Overbeek%ANL-MCS@sri-unix.UUCP (11/05/83)
From: Overbeek@ANL-MCS (Overbeek)
[Reprinted from the Prolog Digest.]
E. W. Lusk and I recently wrote a short note concerning attempts
to produce high-speed Prolog machines. I apologize for perhaps
restating the obvious in the introduction. In any event we
solicit comments.
Stalking the Gigalip
Ewing Lusk
Ross A. Overbeek
Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, Illinois 60439
1. Introduction
The Japanese have recently established the goal of pro-
ducing a machine capable of producing between 10 million and
1 billion logical inferences per second (where a logical
inference corresponds to a Prolog procedure invocation).
The motivating belief is that logic programming unifies many
significant areas of computer science, and that expert sys-
tems based on logic programming will be the dominant appli-
cation of computers in the 1990s. A number of countries
have at least considered attempting to compete with the
Japanese in the race to attain a machine capable of such
execution rates. The United States funding agencies have
definitely indicated a strong desire to compete with the
Japanese in the creation of such a logic engine, as well as
in the competition to produce supercomputers that can
deliver at least two orders of magnitude improvement (meas-
ured in megaflops) over current machines. Our goal in writ-
ing this short note is to offer some opinions on how to go
about creating a machine that could execute a gigalip. It
is certainly true that the entire goal of creating such a
machine should be subjected to severe criticism. Indeed, we
feel that it is probably the case that a majority of people
in the AI research community feel that it offers (at best) a
misguided effort. Rather than entering this debate, we
shall concentrate solely on discussing an approach to the
goal. In our opinion a significant component of many of the
proposed responses by researchers in the United States is
based on the unstated assumption that the goal itself is not
worth pursuing, and that the benefits will accrue from addi-
tional funding to areas in AI that only minimally impinge on
the stated objective.
[ This paper is available on {SU-SCORE} as:
PS:<Prolog>ANL-LPHunting.Txt
There is a limited supply of hard copies that
can be mailed to those with read-only access
to this newsletter -ed ]