Effective utilization of OR-parallelism: A modest proposal
Ewing L. Lusk, Ross Overbeek, LEON S. STERLING · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1988
The Gigalips Project is in the process of producing a Prolog system capable of supporting OR-parallel execution. One explicit goal of that effort is to support sequential Prolog semantics, while exploiting the benefits offered by OR-parallel execution on shared- memory multiprocessors. This goal originated from a desire to retain the body of existing programs, while exploring the benefits of parallel execution. In this document, we present an alternate goal, which we believe is substantially less ambitious. We present a programming style that we advocate for expressing algorithms in prolog. For programs written using the advocated style, the exploitation of OR-parallelism is both natural and straightforward; the thorny issues involved in successfully executing arbitrary Prolog programs in an OR-parallel environment simply disappear. Furthermore, it is our belief that the style we advocate is a natural means for expressing algorithms that might benefit from execution in an OR-parallel environment. 3 refs.