Bounded quantifications for iteration and concurrency in logic programming

The only means for repetition in most logic programming languages, including Prolog, is recursion. Definite iteration is introduced in logic programming languages through the bounded quantification construct. Firstly, it is claimed that this construct is often, though not always, more natural than recursion for expressing relations that involve repetition. In particular, programs involving arrays and similar data structures are significantly simplified. Secondly, it is argued that bounded quantifications should be efficiently implementable on sequential computers and have a high potential for running in parallel, particularly on computers supporting the SPMD model of computation. Bounded quantifications are compared with related constructs from other languages, including the definite loops of imperative languages and the array comprehensions of recent functional languages.     

Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Prolog for a CAD Application

Fifth-generation computers will probably be based on logic programming languages like Prolog rather than on Fortran-type languages. Are such languages suitable to 3-D CAD applications?     

Profiling prolog programs

Profilers play an important role in the development of efficient programs. Profiling techniques developed for traditional languages are inadequate for logic programming languages, for a number of reasons: first, the flow of control in logic programming languages, involving back-tracking and failure, is significantly more complex than in traditional languages; secondly, the time taken by a unification operation, the principal primitive operation of such languages, cannot be predicted statically because it depends on the size of the input; and finally, programs may change at run-time because clauses may be added or deleted using primitives such as assert and retract. This paper describes a simple profiler for Prolog. The ideas outlined here may be used either to implement a simple interactive profiler, or integrated into Prolog compilers.     

If Prolog is the Answer, What is the Question? or What it Takes to Support AI Programming Paradigms

Knowledge programming, which makes use of the explicit representation and interpretation of knowledge to create intelligent programs, requires specialized languages and tools to help programmers. Prolog, an implementation of a logic programing language, provides some of these tools; it and other languages have been argued to be the "best" way to do such knowledge programming. This paper raises questions which suggest that any single paradigm of programming (e.g., logic programming or object-oriented programming) benefits by being integrated in a single environment with other paradigms of programming. Integration of these paradigms with each other, and within a flexible, user-friendly computing environment is also necessary. Such an environment must provide source level debugging and monitoring facilities, analysis and performance tuning tools, and an extended set of user communication programs.     

CROSSV,a simple FORTRAN 77 program for calculating 2-dimensional experimental cross-variograms

A simple portable FORTRAN 77 program is proposed for computing experimental cross-variograms. The program is suitable especially for use on personal computers and can be translated easily into other programming languages.     

The problem with threads

For concurrent programming to become mainstream, we must discard threads as a programming model. Nondeterminism should be judiciously and carefully introduced where needed, and it should be explicit in programs. In general-purpose software engineering practice, we have reached a point where one approach to concurrent programming dominates all others namely, threads, sequential processes that share memory. They represent a key concurrency model supported by modern computers, programming languages, and operating systems. In scientific computing, where performance requirements have long demanded concurrent programming, data-parallel language extensions and message-passing libraries such as PVM, MPI, and OpenMP dominate over threads for concurrent programming. Computer architectures intended for scientific computing often differ significantly from so-called general-purpose architectures.     

Parallel programming with logic languages: A survey

Formal properties of logic languages are largely studied; however, their impact on the practice of software design and programming is currently minimal. In this paper we survey some interesting representatives of the family of logic languages aiming at comparing the different capabilities they offer for designing and programming parallel systems. The logic languages Prolog, Aurora, Flat Concurrent Prolog, Parlog, GHC, and DeltaProlog were chosen, because a suitable set of relevant examples has been published, mostly by the language designers themselves. A number of sample programs is used to expose and compare the languages with respect to their object oriented programming capabilities for multiprocess coordination, interprocess communication, and resource management. Special attention is devoted also to metaprogramming as well, seen as a useful technique for specifying and building the operating environments of the languages themselves. The paper ends with a discussion on positive and negative features found comparing these languages, and indicates some guidelines to be followed in the design of new logic languages.     

Comparative semantics for flow of control in logic programming without logic

We study semantic issues concerning control flow notions in logic programming languages by exploring a two-stage approach. The first considers solely uninterpreted (or schematic) elementary actions, rather than operations such as unification, substitution generation, or refutation. Accordingly, logic is absent at this first stage. We provide a comparative survey of the semantics of a variety of control flow notions in (uninterpreted) logic programming languages including notions such as don't know versus don't care nondeterminism, the cut operator, and/or parallel logic programming, and the commit operator. In all cases considered, we develop operational and denotational models, and prove their equivalence. A central tool both in the definitions and in the equivalence proofs is Banach's theorem on (the uniqueness of) fixed points of contracting functions on complete metric spaces. The second stage of the approach proceeds by interpreting the elementary actions, first as arbitrary state transformations, and next by suitably instantiating the sets of states and of state transformations (and by articulating the way in which a logic program determines a set of recursive procedure declarations). The paper concentrates on the first stage. For the second stage, only a few hints are included. Furthermore, references to papers which supply details for the languages PROLOG and CONCURRENT PROLOG are provided.     

Logical approximation for program analysis

The abstract interpretation of programs relates the exact semantics of a programming language to a finite approximation of those semantics. In this article, we describe an approach to abstract interpretation that is based in logic and logic programming. Our approach consists of faithfully representing a transition system within logic and then manipulating this initial specification to create a logical approximation of the original specification. The objective is to derive a logical approximation that can be interpreted as a terminating forward-chaining logic program; this ensures that the approximation is finite and that, furthermore, an appropriate logic programming interpreter can implement the derived approximation. We are particularly interested in the specification of the operational semantics of programming languages in ordered logic, a technique we call substructural operational semantics (SSOS). We show that manifestly sound control flow and alias analyses can be derived as logical approximations of the substructural operational semantics of relevant languages.     

A Hybrid Analysis of an Optimization Approach for Cluster Applications

Cluster/distributed computing has become a popular, cost-effective alternative to high-performance parallel computers. Many parallel programming languages and related programming models have become widely accepted on clusters. However, the high communication overhead is a major shortcoming of running parallel applications on cluster/distributed computing environments. To reduce the communication overhead and thus the completion time of a parallel application, this paper introduces and evaluates an efficient Key Message (KM) approach to support parallel computing on cluster computing environments. In this paper, we briefly present the model and algorithm, and then analytical and simulation methods are adopted to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. It demonstrates that when network background load increases or the computation to communication ratio decreases, the analysis results show better improvement on communication of a parallel application over the system which does not use the KM approach.     

On goal-directed provability in classical logic

One of the key features of logic programming is the notion of goal-directed provability. In intuitionistic logic, the notion of uniform proof has been used as a proof-theoretic characterization of this property. Whilst the connections between intuitionistic logic and computation are well known, there is no reason per se why a similar notion cannot be given in classical logic. In this paper we show that there are two notions of goal-directed proof in classical logic, both of which are suitably weaker than that for intuitionistic logic. We show the completeness of this class of proofs for certain fragments, which thus form logic programming languages. As there are more possible variations on the notion of goal-directed provability in classical logic, there is a greater diversity of classical logic programming languages than intuitionistic ones. In particular, we show how logic programs may contain disjunctions in this setting. This provides a proof-theoretic basis for disjunctive logic programs, as well as characterising the “disjunctive” nature of answer substitutions for such programs in terms of the provability properties of the classical connectives Λ and Λ.     

MODELS AND TRENDS IN PARALLEL PROGRAMMING

This paper introduces and discusses programming models for parallel processing and recent trends in the area of parallel programming. The paper discusses different parallel programming languages and tools that reflect various parallel computation models. These language differ in expressiveness, portability and performance. Software design and implementation largely varies by using different languages that make the programmer task easy or complex. We describe here the design goals and the main issues of parallel programming models and languages belonging to the following categories: shared-space based languages, message-based languages, parallel toolkits, data-parallel languages, parallel declarative languages, parallel object-oriented languages, and parallel composition-based languages. Tools and languages such as HPF, Linda, Java, OpenMP, PVM, MPI, Parallel C+ +, Sisal, Orca, Mentat, SkieCL, BSP and others are described in some detail. Their main features for design and implementation of high performance applications are discussed. Finally, we outline directions of research and development in the parallel programming area with a special attention to novel approaches based on high-level programming structures that make transparent to the users the architectural details of parallel computing machines.     

A lingua franca for concurrent logic programming

Two of the more important concurrent logic programming languages with nonflat guards are GHC and Parlog. They balance the requirements of having clean semantics and providing good control facilities rather differently, and their respective merits are compared and contrasted. Since concurrent logic programming would benefit from both, but neither language is able to express all the programs expressible in the other language, a lingua franca of these languages is defined and justified. A method is given for translating GHC and Parlog to and from it. The method preserves the arities and execution conditions of each clause. It enables a lingua franca implementation to support both languages transparently, and to provide a simple concurrent logic programming language suitable for programming in its own right     

Instant replay debugging of concurrent logic programs

One problem with debugging (committed choice) concurrent logic programs is that their behaviour may be non-deterministic, in that successive executions of the same program may produce different results. We describe a scheme, based on the ‘Instant Replay’ scheme developed for more conventional parallel languages, that allows us to reproduce the execution behaviour of a concurrent logic program on subsequent executions, so that the execution may be examined for debugging purposes. The properties of concurrent logic programming languages allow us to simplify our scheme greatly. We have demonstrated our scheme with KLIC, and KL1 on the PIM multiprocessors, but it can also be applied to other committed choice concurrent logic programming languages.     

Application of Relational Interval Arithmetic to Computer Performance Analysis: a Survey

This paper presents a survey of the existing work in the area of interval-based performance analysis of computing systems. Intervals in performance analysis is required when uncertainties or variabilities exist in the workload parameters for the performance model of the system. Intervals are also useful for computing upper and lower bounds on system performance. Most conventional analytic models accept a set of single valued parameters and produce a single valued model output. Adaptation of these existing models to handle interval parameters require new techniques that use interval arithmetic. Experiences with relational interval arithmetic provided by a constraint logic programming language in solving a number of performance analysis problems in conventional multiprogrammed computers as well as distributed processing systems are described.     

Database query languages and functional logic programming

Functional logic programming is a paradigm which integrates functional and logic programming. It is based on the use of rewriting rules for defining programs, and rewriting for goal solving. In this context, goals, usually, consist of equality (and, sometimes, inequality) constraints, which are solved in order to obtain answers, represented by means of substitutions. On the other hand, database programming languages involve a data model, a data definition language and, finally, a query language against the data defined according to the data model. To use functional logic programming as a database programming language, (1) we will propose a data model involving the main features adopted from functional logic programming (for instance, handling of partial and infinite data), (2) we will use conditional rewriting rules as data definition language, and finally, (3) we will deal with equality and inequality constraints as query language. Moreover, as most database systems, (4) we will propose an extended relational calculus and algebra, which can be used as alternative query languages in this framework. Finally, (5) we will prove that three alternative query languages are equivalent.     

A theory of complete logic programs with equality

Incorporating equality into the unification process has added great power to automated theorem provers. We see a similar trend in logic programming where a number of languages are proposed with specialized or extended unification algorithms. There is a need to give a logical basis to these languages. We present here a general framework for logic programming with definite clauses, equality theories, and generalized unification. The classic results for definite clause logic programs are extended in a simple and natural manner. The extension of the soundness and completeness of the negation-as-failure rule for complete logic programs is conceptually more delicate and represents the main result of this paper.     

基于 REST 风格的科学计算环境 Web服务 API

基于 Web 页面的计算门户提供了简单易用的用户使用界面,这些门户需要访问异构的计算机群。本文研究和实现基于 REST 风格的科学计算环境 Web 服务 API (SCEAPI-REST),其核心思想是充分利用 Web 服务在复杂系统中的集成优势以及 REST 风格的 API 跨平台和跨编程语言的特性,为开发者提供简单易用的计算机群开发接口,包括用户管理、资源查询、作业管理和文件传输等功能。基于 SCEAPI-REST,开发人员不再需要解决机群访问的繁杂问题,只需要专心构建面向科学计算的终端软件。该 API 已经应用到计算化学、材料科学、生物信息等多个领域的专业社区和工具软件。     

Category-based modularisation for equational logic programming

Although modularisation is basic to modern computing, it has been little studied for logic-based programming. We treat modularisation for equational logic programming using the institution of category-based equational logic in three different ways: (1) to provide a generic satisfaction condition for equational logics; (2) to give a category-based semantics for queries and their solutions; and (3) as an abstract definition of compilation from one (equational) logic programming language to another. Regarding (2), we study soundness and completeness for equational logic programming queries and their solutions. This can be understood as ordinary soundness and completeness in a suitable “non-logical” institution. Soundness holds for all module imports, but completeness only holds for conservative module imports. Category-based equational signatures are seen as modules, and morphisms of such signatures as module imports. Regarding (3), completeness corresponds to compiler correctness. The results of this research applies to languages based on a wide class of equational logic systems, including Horn clause logic, with or without equality; all variants of order and many sorted equational logic, including working modulo a set of axioms; constraint logic programming over arbitrary user-defined data types; and any combination of the above. Most importantly, due to the abstraction level, this research gives the possibility to have semantics and to study modularisation for equational logic programming developed over non-conventional structures. Received April 15, 1994/April 12, 1995