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High-level characteristics of or- and independent and-parallelism in prolog

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Abstract

Although studies of a number of parallel implementations of logic programming languages are now available, their results are difficult to interpret due to the multiplicity of factors involved, the effect of each of which is difficult to separate. In this paper we present the results of a high-level simulation study of or- and independent and-parallelism with a wide selection of Prolog programs that aims to determine the intrinsic amount of parallelism, independently of implementation factors, thus facilitating this separation. We expect this study will be instrumental in better understanding and comparing results from actual implementations, as shown by some examples provided in the paper. In addition, the paper examines some of the issues and tradeoffs associated with the combination of and- and or-parallelism and proposes reasonable solutions based on the simulation data obtained.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK

    Kish Shen

  2. Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

    Manuel V. Hermenegildo

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  1. Kish Shen
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  2. Manuel V. Hermenegildo
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Additional information

This paper is an extended and updated version of Ref. 1. The descriptions in various parts of the paper have been extended; new descriptions, such as the discussion of speculative scheduling have been included; finally, new results are presented: some more programs are studied, and results for Aurora and Muse are provided, along with new results for &-Prolog.

Most of the work reported in this paper was carried out while this author was at: Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University, United Kingdom.

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Shen, K., Hermenegildo, M.V. High-level characteristics of or- and independent and-parallelism in prolog. Int J Parallel Prog 24, 433–478 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02583023

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