Seeing Systolic Computations in a Video Game World

ToonTalkTM is a general-purpose concurrent programming system in which the source code is animated and the programming environment is like a me. Every abstract computational aspect is mapped into a concrete metaphor. For example, a computation is a city, an active object or agent is a house, inter-process communication represented by birds carrying messages between houses, a method or clause is a robot trained by the user and so on. The programmer controls a "programmer persona" in this video world to construct, run, observe, debug, and modify programs. ToonTalk has been described in detail elsewhere [1]. Here we show how systolic programs can be constructed and animated in ToonTalk. Systolic computations run on multiple processors connected in a regular topology, where all communication is via local message passing [2]. A ToonTalk city can be seen as a systolic multi-processor and each house in the city as an active processor. One is able to construct systolic algorithms an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: VL
• Authors: Kenneth M. Kahn
• Keywords: Abstract Computational Aspect, General-purpose Concurrent Programming, Systolic Programs, Visual Languages, VL 1996