LIBRA: A high-performance balanced computer architecture for Prolog

Thesis/Dissertation · Fri Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1988

OSTI ID:6963763

Mills, J W

Four reduced-instruction-set computer (RISC) architectures for Prolog are presented: the Simple Abstract Machine (SAM), the Logic Programming Windowed RISC I (LOW RISC I), the LOW RISC II, and the Logical Inference Balanced RISC Architecture (LIBRA). An informal methodology for the semantic-based design of computer architectures relates the design of each architecture to its predecessor. The suitability of each architecture for Prolog is evaluated using macro expansions for each WAM instruction, from which execution speed, code density, memory usage, branch frequency, standard logical inferences per second, benchmark logical inferences per second and the semantic gap of each architecture relative to Prolog are calculated. The final design, the LIBRA, is 2.3 times as fast as the Berkeley PLM without interleaved memory, and 15 times as fast with eight-way instruction and data memory interleaving, reaching an estimated execution speed of 7.5 million standard logical inferences per second. The LIBRA's performance is due to parallelized tag and data operations, pipelining, reduced branch frequency, and complex single-cycle instructions.

• Research Organization: Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (USA)
• OSTI ID: 6963763
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
DESIGN
ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
EVALUATION
LOGIC CIRCUITS
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PERFORMANCE
PROGRAMMING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
PROLOG
VECTOR PROCESSING