Deterministic receptive processes are kahn processes

Abstract

Deterministic asynchronous concurrent formalisms are valuable because determinism greatly simplifies the design and validation of such systems and most concurrent formalisms are nondeterministic. This paper connects two of the more successful deterministic asynchronous formalisms: Kahn's dataflow networks and Josephs's deterministic receptive processes. The main result: a divergence-free deterministic receptive process is a Kahn process in that it can be modeled by a continuous function from input to output sequences, thus verifying it is compositionally deterministic. This result provides a bridge between two communities, enabling results from the asynchronous digital hardware community to be used in the context of dataflow computation and vice versa.

Concurrency and Communication: Lessons from the SHIM Project

“…Steve Nowick steered us toward the body of work on delay-independent circuits (e.g., van Berkel's Handshake circuits [5]). We compared this class of processes to Kahn's networks [6] and found them to be essentially the same [7]. We studied how to characterize such processes [8], finding that we could characterize them as functions that, when presented with more inputs or output opportunities, never produced less or different data.…”