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Towards a Decentralised General-Purpose Computer

  • Philip C. Treleaven
Conference paper
  • 32 Downloads
Part of the Informatik-Fachberichte book series (INFORMATIK, volume 53)

Abstract

Research into novel decentralised computer architectures may be broadly classified in terms of the computer’s program organisation as: control flow, data flow, reduction, actor and logic. Each of these program organisations supports efficiently a single category of programming language? control flow — conventional languages, data flow — single assignment languages, reduction — applicative languages, actor — object-oriented languages, and logic — predicate logic languages. However general-purpose computers are required ideally to support a number of categories of language efficiently.

Our approach to the design of general-purpose computers, in particular a future decentralised architecture, is to develop computers that embody more than one traditional program organisation. In this paper we describe a computer providing both control flow and data flow. We are working on a computer design that also includes reduction. And our target is a computer providing control flow, data flow, reduction and other styles of programming.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1982

Authors and Affiliations

  • Philip C. Treleaven
    • 1
  1. 1.Computing LaboratoryUniversity of Newcastle upon TyneUK

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