High level structural description of streaming applications

In the streaming domain, applications are often described as dataflow graphs. Each node in the graph is defined by its operation, its evaluation is activated according to the firing rule. As soon as all required input tokens, defined by the consumption rate on each input channel, are available and there is sufficient space available at all output channels, defined by the production rule, the node fires, i.e. all input tokens are consumed and all output tokens are produced. Our research is motivated by the desire for a straight- forward implementation of an application described as a dataflow graph on a multicore architecture. In contrast to other approaches like for example StreamIt or S-NET , that provide a completely new language, we base our design on an already existing language that inherently has a notion of structure: the functional programming language Haskell. We use Haskell both for embedding the grammar for our proposed language as well as to describe streaming applications with the proposed language.