Patent attributes
Roughly described, the invention involves a system including a plurality of functional units that execute different segments of a dataflow, and share intermediate results via a peer-to-peer messaging protocol. The functional units are reconfigurable, with different units being reconfigurable at different levels of granularity. The peer-to-peer messaging protocol includes control tokens or other mechanisms by which the consumer of the intermediate results learns that data has been transferred, and in response thereto triggers its next dataflow segment. A host or configuration controller configures the data units with their respective dataflow segments, but once execution of the configured dataflow begins, no host need be involved in orchestrating data synchronization, the transfer of intermediate results, or the triggering of processing after the data are received. Control overhead is therefore minimized.
