Kung's 1982 paper independently frames the whole systolic dataflow — not just the memory — as analogous to blood circulating through the heart

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H.T. Kung's 1982 paper, "Why Systolic Architectures?" (Computer 15(1):37-46), contains two distinct cardiac framings, not one. The specific, diagram-anchored sentence — "the function of the memory... is analogous to that of the heart; it 'pulses' data... through the array of cells" (p. 39, in the section "Systolic architectures: the basic principle," immediately after the reference to Figure 1) — is the one usually quoted (see claim-systolic-array-named-after-cardiac-systole and, for the misattributed popular version, myth-kung-1982-processor-pumps-quote). Two sections and roughly a dozen paragraphs earlier, in the paper's own second paragraph (p. 37), Kung gives a broader framing that predates and is independent of the diagram: "data flows from the computer memory in a rhythmic fashion, passing through many processing elements before it returns to memory, much as blood circulates to and from the heart." Here the analogy's subject is not the memory alone but the entire circuit — memory out, through the array, back to memory — compared to the full loop of circulation rather than to a single pulsing chamber.

The two framings are complementary rather than redundant: the introduction's second paragraph states the general shape (a circulatory loop), and the later, more specific sentence names which part of the loop does the pulsing (the memory). Together they show the cardiac metaphor was not an incidental aside inserted once near a figure, but a framing Kung returned to deliberately across the paper's introduction and its technical exposition.