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And-Or parallel Prolog: A recomputation based approach

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Abstract

We argue that in order to exploit both Independent And-and Or-parallelism in Prolog programs there is advantage in recomputing some of the independent goals, as opposed to all their solutions being reused. We present an abstract model, called the Composition-tree, for representing and-or parallelism in Prolog programs. The Composition-tree closely mirrors sequential Prolog execution by recomputing some independent goals rather than fully re-using them. We also outline two environment representation techniques for And-Or parallel execution offull Prolog based on the Composition-tree model abstraction. We argue that these techniques have advantages over earlier proposals for exploiting and-or parallelism in Prolog.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Dept. CS, New Mexico State University, Box 30001, 88003, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Gopal Gupta

  2. Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28660-Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

    Manuel V. Hermenegildo

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, BS8 1TR, Bristol, U.K.

    Vítor Santos Costa

Authors
  1. Gopal Gupta
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  2. Manuel V. Hermenegildo
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  3. Vítor Santos Costa
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Additional information

This is an expanded version of the paper “Recomputation Based Implementations of And-Or Parallel Prolog” presented in FGCS’92.

Gopal Gupta, Ph. D.: He has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at New Mexico State University since January 1992. Prior to this he was a Research Associate at the University of Bristol. He obtained his M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1987 and 1991 respectively, and a B. Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, in 1985. He is a recipient of the 1992 Oak Ridge Associated Universities Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. His research interests are in parallel and constraint logic programming, programming languages, parallel processing, and parallel databases.

Manuel Hermenegildo, Ph. D.: He obtained his Ph. D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin (U. S. A.). He is currently Professor in Computer Science at the Dept. of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science of the Technical University of Madrid. Previously he was project leader at the MCC research center and Adjunct Professor at the Dept. of Computer Science of the University of Texas at Austin. He has also been an invited scientist at ICOT and other research centers. He is area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming and editorial advisor of the Journal of New Generation Computing. His current interests are in parallel, concurrent, and constraint logic programming theory and implementation, abstract interpretation, execution visualization, and parallel computer architecture.

Vitor Santos Costa, Ph. D.: He has been an Assistant in Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Oporto since 1985. Since 1988 he has been doing his research in the Department of Computer Science at Bristol University, where he is finishing his Ph. D. on the Compile-Time Tools for the Parallel Execution of Logic Programs. His current research interests concentrate on the parallel implementation of Prolog and other logic programming languages, particularly on compile-time analysis and the problem of correct and efficient execution of programs with sequential control in a parallel environment. He received bachelor’s begree from the University of Oporto in 1984. He received the 1992 IBM Portugal Award for his work on parallel execution of Prolog programs

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Gupta, G., Hermenegildo, M.V. & Costa, V.S. And-Or parallel Prolog: A recomputation based approach. New Gener Comput 11, 297–321 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037180

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037180

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