Performance Analysis of a Parallel Prolog: A Correlated Approach

PEPSys (Parallel ECRC Prolog System) is a research project started in 1984 in the Computer Architecture Group of the European Computer-Industry Research Centre (ECRC). Its general goals are to study and evaluate new and practicable solutions to the problems of parallel logic programming. In this paper, three different evaluation systems used in PEPSys are presented and their results compared. The first one gives the ideal speedup and maximum parallelism achievable in PEPSys programs. Another one is an actual implementation on a commercial multiprocessor, which exhibits effective speedups over sequential implementations of Prolog. The last one is a discrete event simulation, which extends the implementation results to larger, more scalable multiprocessor architectures.

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