Parallelism in Logic

The potential of parallelism in logic reaches far beyond the exploitation of AND- and OR-parallelism usually found in attempts to parallelize PROLOG. This book discusses parallelism in logic and its exploitation on parallel architectures. A variety of categories of parallelism is discussed with respect to different levels of a logical formula and different ways to evaluate it. As an outcome of these investigations it is shown that modularity allows s tructuring of logic programs and meta-evaluation can be used to c ontrol the evaluation process on a parallel system. This combinat ion yields a consistent programming framework with a wide scope. Finally, the suitability of a specific evaluation mechanism for p arallel architectures is investigated.

1 Introduction. - 1. 1 Logic. - 1. 2 Parallelism. - 1. 3 Parallelism and Logic. - 1. 4 Relevance of the Work. - 1. 5 Organization of the Book. - 2 Foundations. - 2. 1 Logic: The Connection Method. - 2. 2 Parallelism: Unity and Processes. - 2. 3 Model Elimination. - 2. 4 A Language: Lop. - 2. 5 Conclusions. - 3 State of the Art. - 3. 1 Parallel Logic Systems. - 3. 2 Conclusions. - 4 Parallelism in Logic. - 4. 1 Chapter Organization. - 4. 2 Variations on Parallelism. - 4. 3 Overview. - 4. 4 Multitasking. - 4. 5 Modularity. - 4. 6 Precision. - 4. 7 Competition. - 4. 8 Spanning Sets. - 4. 9 Reductions. - 4. 10 OR-Parallelism. - 4. 11 Routes. - 4. 12 AND-Parallelism. - 4. 13 Term Parallelism. - 4. 14 Distributed Representation. - 4. 15 Conclusions: Parallelism in Logic. - 5 A Parallel Logic Language: MMLOP. - 5. 1 Overview. - 5. 2 Syntax. - 5. 3 Semantics. - 5. 4 Examples. - 6 Computational Model. - 6. 1 A Computational Model for MMLop. - 7 Architecture. - 7. 1 Overview Architecture. - 7. 2 Spanning Setters. - 7. 3 Mappings to Parallel Architectures. - 7. 4 Unification. - 7. 5 Conclusions: Spanning Setters and Parallel Architectures. - 8 Conclusions. - 8. 1 Foundations. - 8. 2 State of the Art. - 8. 3 Parallelism in Logic. - 8. 4 MMLOP: A Parallel Logic Programming Language. - 8. 5 Computational Model. - 8. 6 Architecture.