Parallel architecture for OPS5

An architecture that captures some of the inherent parallelism of the OPS5 expert system language has been designed and implemented at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A central feature of this architecture is a network bus over which a single host processor broadcasts messages to a set of parallel-rule processors. This transmit-only bus is implemented by a memory-mapped scheme which permits the rule processors to be decoded in parallel. All OPS5 rule-matching processes, and most of the processes associated with conflict resolution, are executed by the parallel-rule processors. The host performs the tasks associated with the firing of a rule selected by the conflict resolution process. Performance data are presented for the prototype system which comprises a host processor and 64 parallel rule processors, each embodying a Motorola MC68000 microprocessor and 512 kbytes of unshared memory