Stream processing has a long history as a way of describing and implementing specific kinds of computational processes. So far, however, it has largely remained an exotic field of endeavor, with relatively small momentum compared to traditional von Neumann computing, and a large variety of programming models, languages, tools, and hardware realizations. However, as sequential machines cease to become faster over time, and future growth in computational speed will clearly derive from an increase in parallelism, the time has come for a general parallel programming model to supplant or complement the von Neumann abstraction
