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Parallel Answer Set Programming

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Handbook of Parallel Constraint Reasoning

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) has become, in recent years, the paradigm of choice for the logic programming community and for a wide variety of application domains. Thanks to its declarative nature, ASP offers excellent opportunities for performance improvements through transparent exploitation of parallelism. This Chapter provides a survey on the main techniques and approaches in the literature to enable exploitation of parallelism in the execution of Answer Set Programming solvers. The survey explores the approaches along two orthogonal dimensions. The first dimension considers the different levels of complexity and features of the underlying language, ranging from propositional Datalog/definite Horn clauses to full ASP. The second dimension, instead, explores the different levels of granularity of exploitation of parallelism, ranging from fine grain parallelism, exploited using general-purpose graphical processing units, to very large grain parallelism exploited on distributed platforms.

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Acknowledgements

The research pursued by the authors on the topics of this Chapter has been partially supported by NSF grants CBET-1401639, HRD-1345232, CNS-1337884, and DGE-0947465, by INdAM GNCS 2014–2017 grants, by PRID ENCASE, and by YASMIN (R.d.B.-UniPG2016/17) and FCRPG.2016.0105.021 projects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics, University of Udine, Udine, Italy

    Agostino Dovier

  2. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Andrea Formisano

  3. Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University, New Mexico, USA

    Enrico Pontelli

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  1. Agostino Dovier
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  2. Andrea Formisano
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  3. Enrico Pontelli
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Correspondence to Agostino Dovier .

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  1. Laboratoire d'informatique (LIX) de l'École polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

    Youssef Hamadi

  2. CRIL, CNRS UMR 8188, Université d'Artois, Lens, France

    Lakhdar Sais

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Dovier, A., Formisano, A., Pontelli, E. (2018). Parallel Answer Set Programming. In: Hamadi, Y., Sais, L. (eds) Handbook of Parallel Constraint Reasoning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63516-3_7

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