The performance of parallel Prolog programs

Author

Fagin, Barry S. ; Despain, Alvin M.

Author_Institution

Thayer Sch. of Eng., Dartmouth Coll., Hanover, NH, USA

Volume

39

Issue

12

fYear

1990

fDate

12/1/1990 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1435

Lastpage

1445

Abstract

Performance results are presented for a parallel execution model for Prolog that supports AND-parallelism, OR-parallelism, and intelligent backtracking. The results show that restricted AND-parallelism is of limited benefit for small programs, but produced speedups from 7-10 on two large programs. OR-parallelism was found to be generally not useful for the benchmarks examined if the semantics of Prolog were preserved. Of particular interest is the phenomenon of super-multiplicative behavior, in which the performance improvement obtained when more than one technique is used is greater than the product of the performance improvements due to each technique individually. The implications of the performance results for parallel Prolog systems are discussed, and directions for future work are indicated

Keywords

PROLOG; parallel programming; performance evaluation; AND-parallelism; OR-parallelism; intelligent backtracking; parallel Prolog programs; performance; super-multiplicative behavior; Computer architecture; Concurrent computing; Engines; High performance computing; Logic programming; Monitoring; Parallel processing; Program processors; Radio access networks; Timing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computers, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9340

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/12.61072

Filename

61072