An Introduction to Controlflow and Dataflow Supercomputing
Miloš Kotlar · Advances in systems analysis, software engineering, and high performance computing book series · 2021
In the controlflow paradigm, based on the finite automata theory, one writes a program in order to control the flow of data through the hardware. In the dataflow paradigm, one writes a program in order to configure the hardware. Then, the question is what moves data through the hardware, if that is not a stored program? Ideally, in the dataflow paradigm, data get moved by the voltage difference between the system input and the system output, with flip-flops and register barriers in-between (FPGAs), or without these barriers (referred as ultimate dataflow), possibly but not necessarily, with the computing infrastructure based on the analog hardware. See the references for one specific viewpoint related to the subject.