Parallelism in Logic: Its Potential for Performance and Program Development

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.