Aquarius

Abstract

I n t r o d u c t i o n . O v e r v i e w .The Aquarius project [1] has, as the fundamental goal of its research, to establish the principles by which very large improvements in performance can be achieved in machines specialized for calculating difficult problems in design automation, expert systems, and signal processing. These problems are characterized by having substantial numeric and symbolic components. We are committed to the eventual design of a very high performance heterogeneous MIMD multiprocessor tailored to the execution of both numeric and logic calculations. Aquarius began in 1983. By 1985 we had completed and demonstrated the Aquarius I system [15] which was a small heterogeneous multiprocessor. Aquarius I achieved about an order of magnitude higher performance than had been achieved up to that time. For example, the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer 'PSI' had achieved 30 KLIPS in 1985. We are currently focusing on an experimental multiprocessor architecture (Aquarius II) for the high performance execution of Prolog that will contain 12 processors specialized for Prolog and others for a total of 16 processors. R e s e a r c h M e t h o d o l o g yIt is worth stating at the outset a number of key concepts which reflect our fundamental methodology for doing research in high performance knowledge processing systems. We believe in a research environment where systems evolve, taking advantage of contributions from a number of sources, both within and outside Berkeley.Second, we believe that issues should be dealt with as quickly and inexpensively as possible: by gadanken experiments, if possible, else analyzing, else simulation, else emulation and finally, only if required, by constructing and analyzing machines.Third, the nature of the high performance execution demands the effective utilization of enormous amounts of memory, coupled both loosely and tightly, it involves exploiting parallelism at both course and fine grain granularities, and it necessitates modularization of the system architecture to accommodate improvements in any element in the structure.Fourth, we are interested in proving concepts, rather than engineering manufactured parts. Thus, we are interested in building experimental architectures which can then be transferred to sites more appropriate than us for fabrication to achieve higher performance and more reliable systems. We are interested in using as many standard components and buses as possible in the experimental machine. This will facilitate the rapid transfer of the architecture technology.Fifth, we believe in working closely with government and industry.

Pipelined OR-parallelism architecture for parallel execution of Prolog

“…Parallel processing of logic programming language Pro log has recently received considerable attention for its application to the field of artificial intelligence [1, 3,4,7,13,15,16,17,20,21,22].…”

An Extended Prolog Architecture for Integrated Symbolic and Numerical Executions

“…In our Aquarius project [4). one of the main applications is design automation [3) and it .requires extensive numeric calculations as well as symbolic manipulations.…”