Summary: Associative Memories Provide an Efficient Control Mechanism for
a Parallel Production System Architecture
Jos'e Nelson Amaral \Lambda Joydeep Ghosh y
(amaral@madona.pucrs.br) (ghosh@pine.ece.utexas.edu)
Departamento de Eletr“onica Dept. of Electr. and Comp. Engineering
Pontif'icia Universidade Cat'olica do RGS The University of Texas at Austin
90619­900 ­ Porto Alegre, RS Austin, Texas 78712
Abstract
Recently we proposed a parallel architecture for production systems [2, 3, 5]. This
novel architecture allows parallel production firing, concurrent matching, and overlap among
matching, selection, and firing of productions. The elimination of global synchronization in
production systems was made possible by the use of serializability as a correctness criterion
and by the construction of an efficient control mechanism for the operation of the machine.
This control mechanism relies heavily in the use of associative memory devices as lookaside
tables. In this paper we study the impact of these memories in the overall performance of
the architecture. We also estimate the amount of associative memory needed for a typical
production system. These results, obtained from a comprehensive system level event­driven
simulator, indicate that substantial improvements in speed can be achieved with a very
modest increase in hardware cost.
1 Introduction

Source: Amaral, José Nelson - Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences