Or-parallel Prolog on a distributed memory architecture

This paper discusses the design of Dorpp, an or-parallel Prolog system for distributed memory architectures, The problem of sharing the environment ac ross a set of nodes that do not physically share memory is addressed in a n ovel manner by designing a Virtual Shared Memory (VSM) scheme to specifical ly meet the requirements of or-parallelism The aim is to avoid the overhead s of a general VSM scheme that would provide a stricter level of memory coh erence than is actually required, The paper identifies the requirements for memory coherence in or-parallel Prolog, and describes how they can be met cheaply, Simulation results are presented and analyzed in order to highligh t key aspects of the system's run-time behavior. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.