Evaluating the impact of coherence protocols on parallel logic programming systems.
Vı́tor Santos Costa, Ricardo Bianchini, Inês Dutra · 1997
In this paper we use execution-driven simulation of a scalable multiprocessor to evaluate the performance of the Andorra-I parallel logic programming system under invalidate and update-based protocols. We study a well-known invalidate protocol and two different update-based protocols. Our results show that for our sample logic programs the update-based protocols outperform their invalidatebased counterparts. The detailed analysis of these results shows that update-based protocols outperform invalidatebased protocols regardless of the type of parallelism exhibited by the benchmarks. The reasons for this behaviour are explained in detail. We conclude that parallel logic programming systems can benefit from update-based protocols and that multiprocessors designed for running these systems efficiently should adopt some form of update or hybrid protocol. 1. Introduction One of the most important advantages of logic programming is the availability of several forms of implicit parallelism t...