The results of a study of a family of parallel symbolic architectures executing several parallel applications are presented. The class of architectures being simulated is characterized by a shared memory structure, by a hierarchical interconnect, and by clustered processors. Speedup measurements were obtained from six different application kernels. Measurements were also performed to assess the degradation of speedup as a function of the interconnection delays, and to study the effect of different scheduling algorithms. The results presented support the claim that the proposed architecture would be a powerful parallel symbolic computation system. The paper discusses processor starvation, fine grain parallelism, unever loads, foreign reference, schedule and indeterminate computation with respect to the applications chosen.
We report on a case study of the potentials for parallel execution of the inference engine of EMYCIN, a rule-based expert system. Multilisp, which supports parallel execution of tasks by means of the future construct, is used to implement the parallel version of the backwards-chaining inference engine. The study uses explicit specification of parallel execution and synchronization to attain parallel execution. It suggests some general techniques for obtaining parallel execution in expert systems and other applications.
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