Parallel logic programming and ZMOB. Final report, 30 June 1982-13 February 1988
Jack Minker, Mark Weiser · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1988
This final report presents a summary of research accomplished to investigate parallel problem solving. Under the current grant, a parallel problem-solving system, PRISM (Parallel Inference System), that was implemented on the VAX/11-780, the PYRAMID and SUN machines, was ported successfully to McMOB and then to the BBN Butterfly parallel architecture. The McMOB architecture is essentially the ZMOB architecture with 16 Motorola 68000 processors, upgrading the Z80A microprocessors, interconnected in a ring structure. Experimental testing of PRISM on McMOB was undertaken in the current year. In addition, several enhancements were made to PRISM to permit experimental analyses to be made, and to incorporate additional features to take full advantage of parallelism in a problem-solving environment. The tracing and statistical gathering packages were extended. An ability to display AND-parallelism was added to the trace program, which displays the execution of a program on the parallel machines. In addition to the above, work continued in the area of informative answers to be presented to a user. Heuristic techniques were developed to determine which information to display.