On a Tabling Engine That Can Exploit Or-Parallelism

2002

Abstract Tabling or memoing is a technique where one stores intermediate answers to a problem so that they can be reused in further calls. Tabling is of interest to logic programming because it addresses some of the most significant weaknesses of Prolog. Namely, it can guarantee termination for programs with the bounded term-size property. Tabled programs exhibit a more complex execution mechanism than traditional Prolog's left-to-right search with backtracking.

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 2001

Since the early days of logic programming, researchers in the field realized the potential for exploitation of parallelism present in the execution of logic programs. Their high-level nature, the presence of non-determinism, and their referential transparency, among other characteristics, make logic programs interesting candidates for obtaining speedups through parallel execution. At the same time, the fact that the typical applications of logic programming frequently involve irregular computations, make heavy use of dynamic data structures with logical variables, and involve search and speculation, makes the techniques used in the corresponding parallelizing compilers and run-time systems potentially interesting even outside the field. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the issues arising in parallel execution of logic programming languages along with the most relevant approaches explored to date in the field. Focus is mostly given to the challenges emerging from the parallel execution of Prolog programs. The paper describes the major techniques used for shared memory implementation of Or-parallelism, Andparallelism, and combinations of the two. We also explore some related issues, such as memory management, compile-time analysis, and execution visualization.

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 2001

Since the early days of logic programming, researchers in the field realized the potential for exploitation of parallelism present in the execution of logic programs. Their high-level nature, the presence of nondeterminism, and their referential transparency, among other characteristics, make logic programs interesting candidates for obtaining speedups through parallel execution. At the same time, the fact that the typical applications of logic programming frequently involve irregular computations, make heavy use of dynamic data structures with logical variables, and involve search and speculation, makes the techniques used in the corresponding parallelizing compilers and run-time systems potentially interesting even outside the field. The objective of this article is to provide a comprehensive survey of the issues arising in parallel execution of logic programming languages along with the most relevant approaches explored to date in the field. Focus is mostly given to the challenge...

Parallel Computing, 1992

This paper presents two algorithms as extensions to the basic Resolution Principle of logic programs which exploit parallelism retaining the full semantics of Prolog. The first algorithm, called SPU, allows parallel execution of unifications belonging to deterministic paths of the proof tree, giving in effect AND-parallel execution. The second algorithm, called MPU, retains the benefits of SPU while exploiting OR-parallelism. We also present simulation results which are indicative of the performance of the proposed algorithms and finally we discuss implementation issues which give rise to the development of a parallel machine.

2010

The paradigm of Tabled Logic Programming (TLP) is now supported by a number of Prolog systems, including XSB, YAP Prolog, B-Prolog, Mercury, ALS, and Ciao. The reasons for this are partly theoretical: tabling ensures termination and optimal known complexity for queries to a large class of programs. However the overriding reasons are practical. TLP allows sophisticated programs to be written concisely and efficiently, especially when mechanisms such as tabled negation and call and answer subsumption are supported. As a result TLP has now been used in a variety of applications from program analysis to querying over the semantic web. This paper provides a survey of TLP and its applications as implemented in XSB Prolog, along with discussion of how XSB supports tabling with dynamically changing code, and in a multi-threaded environment 1 .