[comp.ai.digest] Seminar - Distributing Backward-Chaining Deductions

MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM (Marc Vilain) (01/21/88)

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

    DISTRIBUTING BACKWARD-CHAINING DEDUCTIONS TO MULTIPLE PROCESSORS

                              Vineet Singh
                     Stanford University, and SPAR
                     (VSINGH@SPAR-20.SPAR.SLB.COM)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                     10:30 am, Friday January 29th


The talk presents PM, a parallel execution model for backward-chaining
deductions.  PM exploits more parallelism than other execution models
that use data-driven control and non-shared memory architectures.  The
talk also presents an application-independent, compile-time allocation
strategy for PM that is both fast and effective.  Effectiveness is
demonstrated by comparing speedups obtained from an implementation of
the allocator to an unreachable upper bound and speedups obtained from
random allocations.  The resource allocator uses probabilistic
techniques to predict the amount of communication and the parallelism
profile; this should be useful for other allocation strategies as well.
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