The performance of parallel Prolog programs

Journal Article · Sat Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 1990 · IEEE Transactions on Computers (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (USA)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/12.61072· OSTI ID:5693239

Fagin, B S ^[1]; Despain, A M ^[2]

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1. Dartmouth Coll., Hanover, NH (USA). Thayer School of Engineering
2. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (USA). Dept. of Electrical Engineering

This paper presents performance results 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 to 10 on two large programs. Parallelism was generally not found to be useful for the benchmarks examined if the semantics of Prolog were preserved. Of particular interest is the phenomenon of supermultiplicative behavior, in which the performance improvement obtained when more than one technique is employed 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.

• OSTI ID: 5693239
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Computers (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (USA), Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Computers (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (USA) Vol. 39:12; ISSN ITCOB; ISSN 0018-9340
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PERFORMANCE
PROGRAMMING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
PROLOG