Building and Scheduling Tasks for Parallel Processing

Logic includes a task builder for building tasks comprising data items, a task scheduler for scheduling tasks for processing by a parallel processor, a data store arranged to map content of each data item to an item ID, and a linked-list RAM comprising an entry for each item ID. For each new data item, the task builder creates a new task by starting a new linked list, or adds the data item to an existing linked list. In each linked list, the entry for each data item records a pointer to a next item ID in the list. The task builder indicates when any of the tasks is ready for scheduling. The task scheduler identifies a ready task based on the indication from the task builder, and in response follows the pointers in the respective linked list in order to schedule the data items of the task for processing.