Hardware support for fine-grained event-driven computation in Anton 2

Exploiting parallelism to accelerate a computation typically involves dividing it into many small tasks that can be assigned to different processing elements. An efficient execution schedule for these tasks can be difficult or impossible to determine in advance, however, if there is uncertainty as to when each task's input data will be available. Ideally, each task would run in direct response to the arrival of its input data, thus allowing the computation to proceed in a fine-grained event-driven manner. Realizing this ideal is difficult in practice, and typically requires sacrificing flexibility for performance.