rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (05/21/91)
[Dr. David Kahaner is a numerical analyst visiting Japan for two-years
under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research-Asia (ONR/Asia).
The following is the professional opinion of David Kahaner and in no
way has the blessing of the US Government or any agency of it. All
information is dated and of limited life time. This disclaimer should
be noted on ANY attribution.]
[Copies of previous reports written by Kahaner can be obtained from
host cs.arizona.edu using anonymous FTP.]
To: Distribution
From: David K. Kahaner ONR Asia [kahaner@xroads.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp]
Re: ICOT
17 May 1991
ABSTRACT. A summary of Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Project is
given.
INTRODUCTION. Beginning in 1982 Japan embarked on a ten year program
called Fifth Generation Computer Project (FGCP), funded at over 40billion
Yen from government sources. The goals of the project were to focus on
large-scale parallel-processing for non-numerical computation, in
particular on logic programming. The project generated a great deal of
excitement in the West, partially because of the implications for Japan
of its success, and partially because of questions about its scientific
feasibility. The program is managed and most of the research is performed
at the
Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT)
Mita Kokusai Bldg-21 Floor
1-4-28 Mita, Minato-ku
Tokyo 108 Japan
Tel: +81-3-3456-3195, Fax: +81-3-3456-1618
(Many ICOT staff have electronic mail access. One such is, Dr. Koichi
Furukawa, Research Center Deputy Director, FURUKAWA@ICOT.OR.JP.)
I have deliberately not written much about ICOT. Because it has been in
existance since the early 1980s I felt it was well known already,
especially since much of its output is in English. Nevertheless as the
program gets near its completion it is appropriate to provide a little
summary material. The ICOT Journal (English) is extremely well written
and contains research papers and many references. In particular, Volume
29, 1991 contains summaries of the 1990 FGCP Symposium, held June 1990.
Its contents are worth describing in some detail.
Opening Address. Hirochi Hiroshige (Executive Director ICOT)
Brief summary of reports to follow at the Symposium.
Greetings. Yoshihiro Sakamoto (Dep Dir Mach and Info Indus Bureau, MITI)
How Can the Fifth Generation Computer Technologies Contribute to the
World Today? Hajime Karatsu (Tokai University)
Primarily an exposition of why Japan has been so successful,
comments about the role of manufacturing, and industry
projections. About FGCP, mostly remarks about the friction it
caused in the West, why Western thinking about the project was
incorrect, and the need to apply FGCP results to improve
productivity, especially for older people (Japan will have many of
these in future).
Future Development of Parallel Inference Technology. Kazuhiro Fuchi
(Dir ICOT Research Center)
A history of the software and tools activities, mostly associated
with logic programming, guarded horn clauses, use of KL1 as
language.
Overview of the Fifth Generation Computer Research and Development
Project and Research Organization. Takashi Kurozumi (Dep Dir ICOT
Research Center)
Detailed charts of organizations involved in FGCP, overseas
activities, hardware and software developments, policies and
themes.
Summary of Research and Development in Fiscal 1989 and Results
Achieved. Shunichi Uchida (Manager, Research Dept ICOT Research
Center)
More details about various research activities, experimental
programs during the past year.
What Will Parallel Programming be Like in the Future? Panel
Discussion.
Koichi Furukawa (Dep Dir Research Center ICOT)
Toshinori Watanabe (Hitachi)
Hiroshi Okuno (NTT)
Ryuzo Hasegawa (ICOT)
Yuji Matsumoto (Kyoto University)
Kazuo Taki (ICOT)
Very interesting discussion, especially when contrasted with
similar panels in the US which are composed primarily of people
concerned with numerical applications.
Various models of PIM (Parallel Inference Machine) have been built as
protoyptes. These are summarized in the chart given below. (PIM/p is the
latest.)
PIM/p PIM/c PIM/m PIM/i PIM/K
Machine RISC+macro Horiz Horiz RISC RISC
Instructions micro micro
Target Cycle 50 ns 50 ns 50-60ns 100ns 100ns
Time
LSI Devices Standard Gate Cell base Stand Custom
cell array cell
Process Tech About 1mu-m 0.8mu-m 0.8mu-m 1.2mu-m 1.2mu-m
(Line width)
Machine Multicluster Multiclust 2-Dim Shar mem Two
Configuartion connections in X-bar mesh thru level
in hyper^3 (8 PEs+CC parallel par
(8 PEs linked linked to cache cache
to shared mem) shar mem)
Number of PEs 512 256 256 8PEx2 16PEx2
Various application programs have been written on PIM, including VLSI
(logic design, routing, logic simulation), Go playing, Genetic
information processing, Legal reasoning, Parallel constraint solving,
Parallel theorem proving, and Parallel parsing.
In Tokyo, the US Embassy's Office of S&T Affairs (Science Office) has
prepared a summary of FGCP. The summary was prepared by scientists (not
computer scientists) and written for other non-specialists. I was able to
read and comment on a draft of this summary, and I believe that it is as
accurate a description of the project as is possible given its intended
audience. At the end of this summary there are some remarks about the New
Information Processing Technology project, set to begin in April 1992.
For more details about that I refer readers to my reports (nipt.90, 26
Dec 1990) and (nipt391, 7 April 1991).
1. SUMMARY
The MITI directed ten-year program of the Institute for New
Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) to develop a Fifth Generation
Computer System (FGCS) ends on March 31, 1992. During 1-5 June, 1992,
ICOT will host its fourth and final conference where the project's final
results will be presented. The project has met most of its goals, albeit
on a small scale. Parallel Programming Languages have been developed
which are no more difficult to use than are current sequential languages.
ICOT computers do make inferences, but from small knowledge bases. The
computers do not use spoken languages in their operation, nor do they
translate between languages. Neither is the speed of the ICOT computers
as fast as that of numerical computers.
2. The future looks hopeful, though, for the ICOT computers. ICOT and
U.S. researchers have identified several applications for the computers
(e.g., expert decision systems, legal reasoning programs, genetic
sequencing) which may be realized during the 1990s. Also, MITI may
continue supporting one or more parts of the project past next year; the
Ministry's decision may come as early as this fall.
3. MITI is now deciding whether to launch a subsequent computer
initiative, the New Information Processing (NIPT) project. If
feasibility study results turn out positive, the new program will begin
in April 1992. End Summary
BACKGROUND
4. In 1979, MITI assigned the Electrotechnical Lab in Tsukuba the task
of defining a project to develop a computer system for the 1990s. MITI
accepted the early reports on the project, presented its plan for the
project at an international conference in October 1981, and, in April
1982, initiated a ten-year Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS)
project establishing the institute for Next Generation Computer
Technology (ICOT).
5. ICOT is a consortium of Japanese companies - including associate
members IBM Japan, DEC Japan, and UNISYS Japan - and MITI Institutes with
a Central Research Lab. The number of staff at the Lab has ranged from
50 initially to about 90 now; they stay in ICOT for 2-4 years and then
rotate back to their companies' research institutes. Fewer than a dozen
people have been with ICOT from its beginning. ICOT R&D is funded by
MITI. Annual funding for the project has risen from less than 3 billion
yen to nearly seven billion yen. This figure includes salaries of the 90
staff members but does not include management and administration services
- provided by NTT - and building rental fees; these are paid for by
donations from industry which annually total about 500 million yen.
6. ICOT's main activities consist of developing a hardware and software
prototype system, conducting joint research at overseas research centers,
and studying new information processing technologies and new generation
computer applications. Dr. Kazuhiro Fuchi, ICOT Managing Director, told
the Science Office staff that ICOT's goal has been to develop an
easier-to-use non-Von Neumann Computer System with parallel processing
ability and an ability to make inferences when executing a program. The
key words, he said, were "parallel" and "inference." To accomplish this,
ICOT has been developing hardware and software for each of three
subsystems - knowledge base, problem solving and inference, and
human-machine interaction. Programming is done "in house" as is
computer design; hardware manufacture is contracted out.
Contrast with Earlier Computers
7. According to Takashi Kurozumi, Deputy Director of ICOT's Research
Center, the title "Fifth Generation" was used to differentiate the
project from the earlier generations of computers which had been
classified according to their constituent hardware elements developed to
increase storage: vacuum tubes; transistors; integrated circuits; and
LSI and VLSI chips. These kinds of computers are characterized by
addressable memory or stored program schemes, sequential processing, and
numerical calculation.
8. Shunichi Uchida, the Manager of ICOT's Research Department,
described the development of such Von Neumann computer systems as
follows: First the hardware is designed, then the software, then the
applications are devised. He said the development of the ICOT computer
would follow a different path: First concept, then language/software,
then hardware, then applications based on parallel knowledge processing.
ICOT's computer was to be based on a new framework, a framework that
would allow the computer to do processing that depends on circumstances,
more in the style of human thought, rather than having to follow pre-
defined procedures. Uchida said the power of the ICOT computer is
measured in logical inferences per second (LIPS) rather than in
instructions per second (IPS).
At the Beginning
9. According to documents published in the early 1980's, the project
goal was very ambitious. It was to develop a knowledge information
processing system (KIPS) - something like an expert system - with an
intelligent conversation function and an inferential function employing a
knowledge base. The prototype computer would acquire, accumulate, and
use various types of knowledge; it would infer information from what
previously was not known explicitly; it would make conjectures based on
incomplete knowledge; it would use natural written and spoken language,
graphics, and other types of image input data; it would effectively
translate between languages at a semantic level. The prototype computer
would use a new programming language based on new principles thereby
enabling people with no expert knowledge to write programs with ease. At
the 1988 FGCS Conference, ICOT Research Center Deputy Director Takashi
Kurozumi reconfirmed most of these goals. He did not include the
language translation goal nor the goal of using spoken language in
communication with the computer.
10. To succeed, the project needed to make major technological
innovations to enable the fifth generation computer to support very large
knowledge bases, allow very fast associative retrievals, and to perform
logical inference operations as fast as other computers perform
arithmetic operations. The project also needed to utilize parallelism in
program structure and hardware to achieve high speed, and to develop a
machine-user interface allowing significant use of natural speech and
images. ICOT was not to be an artificial intelligence (AI) project, but
ICOT researchers hoped to combine their own research with that being done
in artificial intelligence, and in architecture and software technology.
Fuchi and Uchida, who have been with ICOT since 1982, told the Science
Office staff in March 1991 that the project has not included VLSI and
device techniques nor has it included neural networks.
11. One of the FGCS's significant characteristics was the decision to
use the European programming language Prolog as the machine language of
the logic processor. Prolog is an "if...then" language, or a predicate
logic language, not designed for numerical calculations. It is useful
for situations and ambiguous activities where the procedures that the
computer is to perform cannot be clearly stated in the program at the
outset, where the way to proceed is not explicitly specified. That was
done, Fuchi said, because the project was to develop technology to carry
out high-level symbolic operations, not numerical calculations. One
American computer expert, evaluating prolog, said it represents knowledge
elegantly but often opaquely and arcanely. He stated further that Prolog
solves automatically the problems it sees, without the user being
involved. This is not universally considered a plus, he noted, because
knowledge engineers typically do not want to abdicate step-by-step
control to a process that conducts massive searches automatically.
Results
12. Because this was Japan's first attempt at parallel computing, ICOT
began by developing sequential inference machines. Development continued
throughout the project, culminating in the completion this year of the
PSI III machine having 1.2 million lips of power. (ICOT officials
consider 10-l5 million LIPS to be equivalent to 400 MIPs.) From this
base, multiple processor sequential inference machines were built, as
were components for a parallel inference machine. The 1992 hardware goal
is a 1,000 processor parallel inference machine (PIM) having 300-600K
LIPS Power. A 32-processor parallel inference machine has been built,
and the larger machine will have 31 additional 32-processor elements.
13. In 1989, the Japanese brought ICOT's sequential inference machine
PSI II to the United States. It generated interest and resulted in a
visit to Japan in February 1990 from Argonne National Laboratory of
scientists to discuss cooperative activities. This past September, ICOT
also hosted a bilateral workshop on parallel knowledge systems and logic
programming; more than a dozen participants came from the U.S. side
alone. Argonne has been doing logic programming and genetic information
processing research, and the lab now has two of ICOT's PSI II machines
(power: 330K LIPS) which are being evaluated. Argonne will host an NSF-
Sponsored workshop this June on parallel theorem proving. NIH officials
are actively considering using ICOT's machine for biological work. The
Lawrence Berkeley Lab has network access to ICOT, and ICOT is building
its own 64KBIT line in Japan to increase domestic access to its
computers. (Currently, for example, Tokyo University cannot access
ICOT's computers.)
14. ICOT officials have wanted to provide programmers with a parallel
system for which they can write programs as easily as they can write
programs for Von Neumann Computers. Project researchers, therefore, have
developed several parallel programming languages for the computers they
have developed. ICOT's longest logic language program, KL-1, is 100,000
lines and growing. This, Uchida said, was the world's longest program
written for parallel processors and was equivalent to more than 300,000
lines of a Von Neumann language program. In addition, ICOT has developed
the world's only full-scale logic language operating systems - SIMPOS,
for its sequential machines, and PIMOS for its parallel ones. Finally,
the latest versions of the ICOT machines also have some Unix capability.
15. ICOT programs can work on other parallel computers, said Uchida,
albeit much slower than on ICOT computers, in part because other parallel
computers were designed to accommodate Von Neumann programming for
numerical computation. The front end processor of such a computer is
designed to find parts of such linear programs that can be worked in
parallel, to send those parts out to the various processors, and then to
reintegrate those parts back into the program. ICOT'S non-numerical
programs do not run efficiently on such machines. On the other hand,
Fuchi noted, since Cray (and other parallel) computers were designed (for
numerical computation and thus) to accept languages such as Fortran there
is much more demand for them today than there is for ICOT's non-numerical
computers - which cannot use Fortran or other sequential programming
languages.
16. There have been three conferences held in connection with the
project -in 1981, 1984, 1988. ICOT will sponsor the project's final
conference in the Tokyo Prince Hotel on 1-5 June 1992, where final
results will be presented. ICOT publishes a quarterly journal which is
distributed to over 1,100 locations - 600 of these in 36 foreign
countries. ICOT also receives long-term researchers from the United
States, the U.K., and France, and short-term researchers from those and a
variety of other countries. Dr. Mark E. Stickel, SRI International,
currently is being supported at ICOT through an NSF award. Dozens of
personnel sequence inference machines have been commercialized by the
companies party to ICOT.
17. The project has met most of its goals, albeit on a very small scale.
Parallel programming languages have been developed which are no more
difficult to use than current sequential languages. ICOT computers do
make inferences, but from small knowledge bases. The computers do not
use spoken languages in their operation, nor do they translate between
languages. Fuchi told the Science Office staff that efforts have not
been made toward voice recognition because such a computer would be a
"special" computer, and ICOT's computer was to be a "general, all-
purpose" computer. The computer's speed also is not as fast as that of
numerical computers.
18. Uchida indicated several future applications for a parallel
inference system. These included VLSI CAD applications, theoretical math
systems, a variety of expert decision systems, legal reasoning and
grammar/syntax programs, genetic sequencing and other applications in
biology, and go-playing programs - similar to current chess-playing
programs. He did not speculate, though, on when these applications might
be realized.
19. Fuchi told the Science Office staff that ICOT staff members are
currently reviewing the project to decide which parts of it should
continue past next year; he expected an announcement on this to be made
by the end of the summer. In his opinion, the most successful part of
the project is the hardware model based on the PIMOS operating system.
Fuchi thought that the world's computer industry is "not yet mature
enough to capitalize on the research coming out of ICOT," that ICOT was
"too far out in front" of the rest of the computer industry. He said he
will suggest to MITI that it will be the Government's responsibility to
nurture the ICOT computer until industry is ready for it.
20. ICOT's future also might be spelled NIPT. The Embassy reported on
the new information processing technology (NIPT) initiative last year
(Reftel A) after the December International Workshop on the project and
last month (Reftel B) after attending that NIPT International Symposium
on March 13-14. MITI officials plan for NIPT to succeed ICOT in 1992.
The NIPT project differs in several respects with ICOT, however. First,
NIPS is from the beginning an international project; MITI officials have
been actively seeking international input into the design of the NIPT
program. ICOT has been a domestically-planned MITI project, but an open
one whose information has been shared with the rest of the world.
21. SECOND, NIPT is building on the advances made during the 1980s by
ICOT and others in computers and associated technology, although at the
moment MITI officials do not see NIPT as directly incorporating any ICOT
technology. NIPT probably will concentrate on massively parallel systems
which will be optically connected. It will benefit from advances made in
VLSI and VLSI technology. Advocates hope they can use future advances in
biology, physiology, psychology, and neurology to develop neural networks
for the NIPT computer. Third, NIPS' initial focus is principally on
hardware; ICOT's principal initial focus was more on software. Fourth,
NIPT computers will be able to crunch numbers; ICOT's cannot. Fifth, the
NIPT project will not be conducted in a single institute, such as ICOT,
and it will have many R&D objectives.
22. NIPT will be funded initially at a lower level than ICOT currently
is. MITI officials have indicated that NIPT will be funded at 30 million
dollars per year, after the feasibility study. This is about 60 percent
of current ICOT funding. There is much more interest in NIPT worldwide,
especially within industry and government, than there has been in ICOT
which has generated almost all of its interest in academia. Nonetheless,
ICOT has been a respectable program; its researchers have made major
developments in inference languages and consideration is being given to
tie-ups with vector supercomputers, such as at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputer center in the United States. Its latest machines are
becoming more Unix-capable. If the GOJ continues to support the program
after 1992, if an increasing number of applications can be found for
ICOT's computers, and if users can be convinced that there is money to be
made by these non-numeric applications, ICOT R&D may continue in parallel
with NIPT. How appropriate.
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