Parallel Problem Solving System, PRISM (Parallel Inference System)
Abstract
A parallel problem solving problem solving system, PRISM (Parallel Inference System), that was implemented on the VAX/11-780, the PYRAMID and SUN machines, was ported successfully to McMOB and then to the BBN Butterfly parallel architecture. The McMOB architecture is essentially the ZMOB architecture with 16 Motorola 68000 processors, upgrading the Z80A microprocessors, interconnected in a ring structure. Experimental testing of PRISM on McMOB was undertaken. In addition, several enhancements were made to PRISM to permit experimental analyses to be made, and to incorporate additional features to take full advantage of parallelism in a problem solving environment. The tracing and statistical gathering packages were extended. An ability to display AND-parallelism was added to the trace program which displays the execution of a program on the parallel machines. Heuristic techniques were developed to determine which information to display to a user. The system software for ZMOB/McMOB is now robust and considered completed. This has allowed us to re-emphasize our studies on parallel software. A new formalism for slicing/splicing was developed which eliminates much of the run-time overhead of the technique, allowing for the development of a splicing compiler. Work has also focused on the development of debugging tools for parallel software and the integration of artificial intelligence techniques into debugging software.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 19, 1988
- Accession Number
- ADA204915
Entities
People
- Jack Minker
Organizations
- University of Maryland