Exploiting path parallelism in logic programming

Abstract

This paper presents a novel parallel implementation of Prolog. The system is based on Multipath, a novel execution model for Prolog that implements a partial breadth-first search of the SLD-tree. The paper focusses on the type of parallelism inherent to the execution model, which is called path parallelism. This is a particular case of data parallelism that can be efficiently exploited in a SPMD architecture. A SPMD architecture oriented to the Multipath execution model is presented. A simulator of such system has been developed and used to assess the performance of path parallelism. Performance figures show that path parallelism is effective for non-deterministic programs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version