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Table space designs for implicit and explicit concurrent tabled evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2018

MIGUEL AREIAS Open the ORCID record for MIGUEL AREIAS [Opens in a new window]  and
RICARDO ROCHA Open the ORCID record for RICARDO ROCHA [Opens in a new window]
MIGUEL AREIAS
Affiliation:
CRACS & INESC-TEC and Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre, 1021/1055, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal (e-mail: miguel-areias@dcc.fc.up.pt, ricroc@dcc.fc.up.pt)
RICARDO ROCHA
Affiliation:
CRACS & INESC-TEC and Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre, 1021/1055, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal (e-mail: miguel-areias@dcc.fc.up.pt, ricroc@dcc.fc.up.pt)
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Abstract

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One of the main advantages of Prolog is its potential for the implicit exploitation of parallelism and, as a high-level language, Prolog is also often used as a means to explicitly control concurrent tasks. Tabling is a powerful implementation technique that overcomes some limitations of traditional Prolog systems in dealing with recursion and redundant sub-computations. Given these advantages, the question that arises is if tabling has also the potential for the exploitation of concurrency/parallelism. On one hand, tabling still exploits a search space as traditional Prolog but, on the other hand, the concurrent model of tabling is necessarily far more complex, since it also introduces concurrency on the access to the tables. In this paper, we summarize Yap's main contributions to concurrent tabled evaluation and we describe the design and implementation challenges of several alternative table space designs for implicit and explicit concurrent tabled evaluation that represent different trade-offs between concurrency and memory usage. We also motivate for the advantages of using fixed-size and lock-free data structures, elaborate on the key role that the engine's memory allocator plays on such environments, and discuss how Yap's mode-directed tabling support can be extended to concurrent evaluation. Finally, we present our future perspectives toward an efficient and novel concurrent framework which integrates both implicit and explicit concurrent tabled evaluation in a single Prolog engine.

Keywords

TablingTable SpaceConcurrencyImplementation

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 18 , Special Issue 5-6: Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Logic Programming , September 2018 , pp. 950 - 992
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Footnotes

*This work is partially funded by the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) through Project 9471-RIDTI – Reforçar a Investigação, o Desenvolvimento Tecnológico e a Inovação – and through the COMPETE 2020 Programme within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961, and by National Funds through the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013. Miguel Areias is funded by the FCT grant SFRH/BPD/108018/2015.

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