Effects of parallelism on blackboard system scheduling
Keith Decker, Alan Garvey, Marty Humphrey, Victor Lesser · 1991
This paper investigates the effects of parallelism on blackboard system scheduling. A parallel blackboard system is described that allows multiple knowledge source instantiations to execute in parallel using a shared-memory blackboard approach. New classes of control knowledge are defined that use information about the relationships between system goals to schedule tasks — this control knowledge is implemented in the DVMT application on a Sequent multiprocessor using BBl-style control heuristics. The usefulness of the heuristics is examined by comparing the effectiveness of problem-solving with and without the heuristics (as a group and individually). Problem solving with the new control knowledge results in increased processor utilization and decreased total execution time. 1