Parallel logic programming and ZMOB and parallel-systems software and hardware. Final report, 10 October 1984-11 January 1985
Minker, Weiser · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1985
The initial version of PRISM uses a simulation of the ZMOB hardware, and has been fully tested and debugged. 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. Tracing and a statistical-gathering package were added to permit experimental analysis. An AND-parallelism capability was added to achieve a second version of the PRISM system, and other features were added to the system to more fully exploit parallelism. Preliminary application and evaluation studies were performed. In the area of systems hardware and software, the ZMOB processor is now fully functional and in everyday use with 128 processors. Work is continuing on an experimental upgrade of some of ZMOB's processors to 68000s. Basic-system software for multiprocessing on ZMOB is becoming more robust and performance studies now pinpoint areas for improvement. Studies of parallel software debugging continue to prove the value of multiple program views, and in particular the dicing approach was verified in a controlled experiment. An interactive visual slicer was also constructed. Studies of the automatic parallelization of programs continues. Arbitrarily structured programs can now be sliced/spliced, and techniques that significantlymore » reduce information overhead between the slices and the splicer are used.« less