Traditional schemes for abstract interpretation-based global analysis of logic programs generally focus on obtaining procedure argument mode and type information. Variable sharing information is often given only the attention needed to preserve the correctness of the analysis. However, such sharing information can be very useful. In particular, it can be used for predicting runtime goal independence, which can eliminate costly run-time checks in and-parallel execution. In this paper, a new algorithm for doing abstract interpretation in logic programs is described which concentrates on inferring the dependencies of the terms bound to program variables with increased precision and at all points in the execution of the program, rather than just at a procedure level. Algorithms are presented for computing abstract entry and success substitutions which extensively domain independent fixpoint algorithm is presented and described in detail. The algorithms are illustrated with examples. Finally, results from an implementation of the abstract interpreter are presented. 1

This thesis introduces the programming language Guarded Horn Clauses which is abbreviated to GHC. Guarded Horn Clauses was born from the examination of existing logic programming languages and logic programming in general, with special attention paid to parallelism. The main feature of

This paper addresses the issue of the practicality of global flow analysis in logic program compilation, in terms of speed of the analysis, precision, and usefulness of the information obtained. To this end, design and implementation aspects are discussed for two practical abstract interpretation-based flow analysis systems: MA 3 , the MCC And-parallel Analyzer and Annotator; and Ms, an experimental mode inference system developed for SB-Prolog. The paper also provides performance data obtained from these implementations and, as an example of an application, a study of the usefulness of the mode information obtained in reducing run-time checks in independent and-parallelism. Based on the results obtained, it is concluded that the overhead of global flow analysis is not prohibitive, while the results of analysis can be quite precise and useful. 1 Introduction The extensive use of advanced compilation techniques [8, 22, 30, 32, 33, 34], coupled with parallel execution [5, 10,...

Machine (WAM) [33]. &- Prolog, the source language in this model, is basically Prolog, with the addition of the parallel conjunction operator "&" and a set of parallelism-related builtins, which includes several types of groundness and independence checks, and synchronization primitives. Parallel conditional execution graphs (which cause the execution of goals in parallel if certain conditions are met) can be constructed by combining these elements with the normal Prolog constructs, such as "-?" (if-then-else). For syntactic convenience (and historical reasons) an additional construct, the CGE, is also provided. We now study the correctness of CGEs. Definition 8. (CGE) A CGE (Conditional Graph Expression) is a structure of the form ( i cond =? goal 1 & goal 2 & ... & goal n ) where i cond is an independence condition as defined previously, and each goal i , i = 1; : : : ; n, is either a literal or (recursively) a CGE. CGEs appear as literals in the bodies of clauses. From an operat...

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

Abstract: While the ability to simulate nondeterminism and compute multiple solutions for a single query is a powerful and attractive feature of logic programming languages, it is expensive in both time and space. Since programs in such languages are very often functional, i.e. do not produce more than one distinct solution for a single input, this overhead is especially undesirable. This paper describes how pro-grams may be analyzed statically to determine which literals and predicates are functional, and how the program may then be optimized using this information. Our notion of ‘‘functionality’ ’ subsumes the notion of ‘‘determinacy’ ’ that has been considered by various researchers. Our algorithm is less reliant on language features such as the cut, and thus extends more easily to parallel execution strategies, than others that have been proposed.

: In recent years a lot of research has been invested in parallel processing of numerical applications. However, parallel processing of Symbolic and Artificial Intelligence applications has largely been ignored. This paper presents a high performance system for parallel symbolic computing based on the logic programming paradigm. Logic programming is a paradigm of programming based on a subset of first order logic. An important property of logic programming languages, such as Prolog, is that their declarative semantics is largely independent of the order in which different operations are performed during execution of the program. The different operations can also be performed in parallel, and as a result it is possible to exploit substantial parallelism from Prolog programs, that have been written for sequential machines, without requiring the user to make any modifications to them. In this paper we present a model called ACE that accomplishes this. ACE is a computational model...

This paper describes an extension to NU-Prolog which allows evaluable functions to be defined using equations. We consider it to be the most pragmatic way of combining functional and relational programming. The implementation consists of several hundred lines of Prolog code and the underlying Prolog implementation was not modified at all. However, the system is reasonably efficient and supports coroutining, optional lazy evaluation, higher order functions and parallel execution. Efficiency is gained in several ways. First, we use some new implementation techniques. Second, we exploit some of the unique features of NU-Prolog, though these features are not essential to the implementation. Third, the language is designed so that we can take advantage of implicit mode and determinism information. Although we have not concentrated on the semantics of the language, we believe that our language design decisions and implementation techniques will be useful in the next generation of combined functional and relational languages. Keywords: logic programming, equations, functions, parallelism, indexing, lazy evaluation, higher order. -- 1 -- 1 Introduction

This paper addresses the design of visual paradigms for studying the parallel execution of logic programs. First, an intuitive method is proposed for arriving at the design of a paradigm and its implementation as a tool for a given model of parallelism. This method is based on stepwise refinement starting from the definition of basic notions such as events and observables and of some precedence relationships among events which hold for the given model of parallelism. The method is then applied to several types of parallel execution models for logic programs (Or-- parallelism, Restricted And--parallelism, Determinate Dependent And parallelism) for which visualization paradigms are designed. Finally, VisAndOr, a tool which implements all of these paradigms is presented, together with a discussion of its usefulness through examples. 1 Introduction Writing programs for parallel hardware has traditionally been considered a difficult task both because of the intrinsic difficulty of having ...

Studying independence of literals, variables, and substitutions has proven very useful in the context of logic programming (LP). Here we study independence in the broader context of constraint logic programming (CLP). We show that a naive extrapolation of the LP definitions of independence to CLP is unsatisfactory (in fact, wrong) for two reasons. First, because interaction between variables through constraints is more complex than in the case of logic programming. Second, in order to ensure the efficiency of several optimizations not only must independence of the search space be considered, but also an orthogonal issue -- "independence of constraint solving." We clarify these issues by proposing various types of search independence and constraint solver independence, and show how they can be combined to allow different independence-related optimizations, from parallelism to intelligent backtracking. Sufficient conditions for independence which can be evaluated "a-priori" at run-time a...