Since the early days of logic programming, researchers in the field realized the potential for exploitation of parallelism present in the execution of logic programs. Their high-level nature, the presence of non-determinism, and their referential transparency, among other characteristics, make logic programs interesting candidates for obtaining speedups through parallel execution. At the same time, the fact that the typical applications of logic programming frequently involve irregular computations, make heavy use of dynamic data structures with logical variables, and involve search and speculation, makes the techniques used in the corresponding parallelizing compilers and run-time systems potentially interesting even outside the field. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the issues arising in parallel execution of logic programming languages along with the most relevant approaches explored to date in the field. Focus is mostly given to the challenges emerging from the parallel execution of Prolog programs. The paper describes the major techniques used for shared memory implementation of Or-parallelism, And-parallelism, and combinations of the two. We also explore some related issues, such as memory

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This thesis presents design, application, implementation, and evaluation of computation spaces as abstractions for programming constraint services at a high level. Spaces are seamlessly integrated into a concurrent programming language and make constraintbased computations compatible with concurrency through encapsulation. Spaces are applied

Instruction-set simulators allow programmers a detailed level of insight into, and control over, the execution of a program, including parallel programs and operating systems. In principle, instruction set simulation can model any target computer and gather any statistic. Furthermore, such simulators are usually portable, independent of compiler tools, and deterministic---allowing bugs to be recreated or measurements repeated. Though often viewed as being too slow for use as a general programming tool, in the last several years their performance has improved considerably. We describe SIMICS, an instruction set simulator of SPARC-based multiprocessors developed at SICS, in its rôle as a general programming tool. We discuss some of the benefits of using a tool such as SIMICS to support various tasks in software engineering, including debugging, testing, analysis, and performance tuning. We present in some detail two test cases, where we've used SimICS to support analysis and performance ...

We have implemented a technique for execution of formal, model-based specifications. The specifications we can execute are written at a level of abstraction that has not previously been supported in executable specification languages. The specification abstractions supported by our execution technique include quantified assertions that reference post-state values, and indirect definitions of post-state values (definitions that do not use equality). Our approach is based on translating specifications to the concurrent constraint programming language AKL. While there are, of course, expressible assertions that are not executable, our technique is amenable to any formal specification language based on a finite number of intrinsic types and pre- and postcondition assertions.

This paper presents the Fire model, an implementation scheme of the "or-under-and, no reusage" execution scheme for and/or parallelism in Prolog. Unlike previous schemes, the Fire model does not contain any private storage for the alternative bindings. Instead, the bindings are stored in data-structures associated with the search-space, and is accessible by all. The advantage is that task-switching and scheduling, one of the major area of complexities with previous schemes, becomes simple and constant time. Another property of the Fire model is that when either and- or or-parallelism alone is exploited, there are little extra overheads when compared to schemes which exploits only one of these forms of parallelism. 1 Introduction There has been a lot of interest in the implicit parallel execution of Logic Programming languages, especially of Prolog, and many schemes which exploit various forms of and- and or-parallelism have been proposed and implemented. Although many of the early pro...