Non-sequential processing: bridging the semantic gap left by the von Neumann architecture

Parallel processing has proven to be easy to implement in hardware but difficult to deliver because of the software problems. First, the distributed semantics in the Virtuoso RTOS, based on the CSP model, will be described to demonstrate how to overcome this gap. A more radical solution will then be described which no longer defines programming as a procedure that operates on data, but as a specification of data sets that require transformations. While this can be emulated on top of the CSP model, more efficient hardware implementations are possible. The author speculates that this could result in architectures that are hard real-time and optimised by design.