An Extended Prolog Architecture for Integrated Symbolic and Numerical Executions

Abstract

Numerically intensive calculations are not well supported by Prolog, yet there are important applications that require tightly coupled symbolic and numeric calculations. The Aquarius Numeric Processor (ANP) is an extended numeric Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) based on the Berkeley Programmed Logic Machine (PLM) to support integrated symbolic and numeric calculations. This extension expands the existing numeric data type to include 32- and 64-bit integers, single and double precision floating-point numbers conforming to the IEEE Standard P754. A new class of data structure, numeric arrays, is added to represent matrices and arrays found in most scientific programming languages. Powerful numeric instructions are included to manipulate the new data types. Dynamic Operand Coercion (DOC) provides dynamic type checking and coercing of operands. The ANP and PLM together provide for the efficient execution of symbolic and numeric operations written in AI languages such as Prolog and Lisp. Simulated performance results indicate the system will achieve about 10 MFLOPs on the Prolog version of some Whetstone and Linpack benchmarks and close to 20 MFLOPs on some matrix operations (all in double precision).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 14, 1988
Accession Number
ADA619779

Entities

People

  • Alvin M. Despain
  • Robert Yung
  • Yale N. Patt

Organizations

  • University of California, Berkeley

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  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

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  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computer-Aided Design
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Decoding
  • Digital Signal Processing
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Floating Point Operations
  • Instruction Set Architecture
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  • Computer Programming and Software Development.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.