A mathematical approach to modelling the flow of data and control in computational networks

This paper proposes a mathematical formalism for the synthesis and qualitative analysis of computational networks that treats data and control in the same manner. Expressions in this notation are given a direct interpretation in the implementation domain. Topology, broadcasting, pipelining, and similar properties of implementations can be determined directly from the expressions. This treatment of computational networks emphasizes the space/time tradeoff of implementations. A full instantiation in space of most computational problems is unrealistic, even in VLSI (Finnegan [4]). Therefore, computations also have to be at least partially instantiated in the time domain, requiring the use of explicit control mechanisms, which typically cause the data flow to be nonstationary and sometimes turbulent.