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The &-Prolog system: Exploiting independent and-parallelism

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Abstract

The &-Prolog system, a practical implementation of a parallel execution model for Prolog exploiting strict and non-strict independent and-parallelism, is described. Both automatic and manual parallelization of programs are supported. This description includes a summary of the system’s language and architecture, some details of its execution model (based on the RAP-WAM model), and data on its performance on sequential workstations and shared memory multiprocessors, which is compared to that of current Prolog systems. The results to date show significant speed advantages over state-of-the-art sequential systems.

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A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 1990 International Conference on Logic Programming, MIT Press.

The work reported in this paper was performed in part at MCC’s DC Lab. This author was supported in part by ESPRIT project 2471 “PEPMA” and CICYT project 361.208.

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Hermenegildo, M.V., Greene, K.J. The &-Prolog system: Exploiting independent and-parallelism. New Gener Comput 9, 233–256 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037164

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