&ACE: a high-performance parallel Prolog system

In recent years a lot of research has been invested in parallel processing of numerical applications. However, parallel processing of Symbolic and AI applications has received less attention. This paper presents a system for parallel symbolic computing, named ACE, based on the logic programming paradigm. ACE is a computational model for the full Prolog language, capable of exploiting Or-parallelism and Independent And-parallelism. In this paper we focus on the implementation of the and-parallel part of the ACE system (called &ACE) on a shared memory multiprocessor, describing its organization, some optimizations, and presenting some performance figures, proving the ability of &ACE to efficiently exploit parallelism.<
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