Data Flow Programming Languages

The advancement of the speed of computers has been phenomenal over the past two decades. There have been several orders of magnitude improvement, so that now processors exist with cycle times of a few nanoseconds that can execute several million instructions in a second. Nevertheless the demand for computing cycles has outstripped even these gains. Compute bound jobs such as weather prediction, simulation, or monte-carlo analysis can require execution speeds in the billions of instructions per second. Therefore the search for faster computers goes on.