Author Rebuttal to Rocha et al. “Comments on Minimizing Buffer Requirements under Rate-Optimal Schedule in Regular Dataflow Networks”

Abstract

The claims made in our paper (Govindarajan, et al., JVLSI 2002) are indeed correct. For the example discussed in page 212 of our paper (reproduced here in Fig. 1) and the schedule given in page 211 (reproduced here in Table 1), the buffer requirements for all arcs are shown in Table 2. It can be seen that the minimum buffer requirements for arcs (a, b), (b, a), (b, d), (d, b), (c, d), and (d, c), are respectively 2, 3, 2, 3, 6, and 6. And the total buffer requirement is indeed 22. It is possible to have other rate-optimal schedules which may have a buffer requirement which is more than the minimum requirement. As stated in our paper, the buffer requirement is ONLY during the steady-state execution of a minimum buffer rateoptimal schedule. The reasons for following this approach, as stated in our paper, is that the steady-state kernel is what is executed repeatedly (significantly more number of times