stevens@ANL-MCS.ARPA (Rick L. Stevens) (11/21/87)
ANNOUNCING
=============
A PROLOG BENCHMARKING WORKSHOP
During the last SLP there was some concern that the benchmark programs
being quoted in the literature did not reflect real Prolog programming
practices. Now is your chance to do something about it. A workshop
on benchmarking Prolog programs will be held at The Aerospace
Corporation in Los Angeles. The main function of this workshop is to
collect and measure a large number of modern production (real
application) Prolog programs.
The workshop will last three days, and will be held sometime during
the first two weeks of February. The exact date will be selected to
enable the most people to attend. The workshop will be sponsored by
The Aerospace Corporation and is being held under the auspices of the
Association of Logic Programming. Since resources for running the
benchmarks will be limited the meeting will be open only to those who
contact the organizers.
The first half of the workshop will be spent discussing the performance
issues we wish to address, porting of code, and instrumenting of
Prolog programs and implementations. The second half will be spent
running the code and collecting and analyzing the data.
We hope to publish the results either as a widely available Technical
Report or as a special journal article in a journal such as the Journal
of Logic Programming or New Generation Computing.
Attendance at the workshop will be limited to those who either bring
an implementation of Prolog or 1,000 or more lines of "original"
Prolog source. Programs with more than 1,000 lines will certainly be
accepted. The thing we wish to guard against is toy programs that
don't reflect the serious use of the language.
Of course, we would like code that has been written recently and that
reflects the best of Prolog style. But any ``real'' Prolog application
would be acceptable. ( No code with more that 3 cuts per clause.
:-)). Hopefully those in attendance will represent a balance between
University and Commercial applications.
The code brought should be covered by a GNU type ``copyleft''. That
is unlimited distribution of unmodified sources. The object is to get
unmodified copys of programs and input data sets to as many people as
possible. The Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit organization will
distribute the benchmark suite.
We would like to have the environment set up in advance so as much time
as possible can be spent on performance analysis. To do this
we will set up a mail address where code can be e-mailed in advance.
Participants can also bring a UNIX tar tape. The computers available at
Aerospace include a Sequent, VAXes, Suns, and various types of
PCs. We will try to have as many different implementations of Prolog
available as possible.
A limited amount of financial support from the Aerospace Corporation
will be available for University attendees.
Please let us know by December 15, 1987 if you intend to attend.
If you want to attend, please send us your
name,
e-mail address,
country of citizenship,
smail address,
date, if you have a preference
if you will need financial support
date that would be best for you, and
what you'll bring.
Send responses to:
prolog-workshop@anl-mcs.arpa
If you can't get ahold of us through e-mail, you can use:
Carl Kesselman Rick Stevens
MS M1/102 Math and Computer Science Division
The Aerospace Corporation Argonne National Laboratory
P.O. Box 92957 Argonne IL 60439
Los Angeles, CA 90009-9295 (312) 972-3378
(213) 336-6691
If you have a problem with the distribution agreement, questions or
suggestions, please contact us at the above address.
Hope to see you there.
Rick Stevens Carl Kesselman
stevens@anl-mcs.arpa carl@aerospace.aero.org
Argonne National Laboratory The Aerospace Corporation