Toward efficient execution of dataflow actors

Dataflow descriptions are a natural match to application areas such as signal processing, cryptography, networking, image processing, and media coding. This paper addresses the problem of efficiently executing the basic elements of a dataflow program, its actors, written in a language such as MPEG's RVC-CAL. Using actor machines as an execution model for dataflow actors, we devise a metric for measuring the quality of a translation in terms of program size and execution efficiency, and then build, evaluate and compare a number of translators with each other and prior art, using MPEG reference code as a benchmark.