Parallel answer set solving algorithm based on multi-core processor technology

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is widely used in many areas of Artificial Intelligence. A parallel answer set solving algorithm based on multi-core processor technology is proposed in this paper. The parallel algorithm is designed on the shared-memory parallel computing model which is the abstract model of multi-core processor. The algorithm can distribute the whole solving task to several threads separately run on different cores of the multi-core processor. To make this parallel algorithm more efficient, we implement load balancing among different threads by the technique of shared global queue. The experimental results show that the parallel algorithm can improve the solving efficiency by times with the growth of processor cores.