Speculative Computation and Priorities in Concurrent Logic Languages

Huntbach, Matthew M.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4471-3546-3_2

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

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“…Local Speculation [23,6] does some speculations on the local processor when it would otherwise be waiting, reducing the minimum size for a useful speculation. Huntback [17] speculatively evaluates logic programming expressions in parallel, with the user able to annotate speculations with a priority. A major preoccupation for speculative parallelism is achieving large enough granularity; otherwise the potential gain from parallelism is cancelled out by the cost of spawning and synchronisation.…”

Section: Speculative Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimistic evaluation

Ennals

Jones

2003

Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

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Lazy programs are beautiful, but they are slow because they build many thunks. Simple measurements show that most of these thunks are unnecessary: they are in fact always evaluated, or are always cheap. In this paper we describe Optimistic Evaluation -an evaluation strategy that exploits this observation. Optimistic Evaluation complements compile-time analyses with run-time experiments: it evaluates a thunk speculatively, but has an abortion mechanism to back out if it makes a bad choice. A run-time adaption mechanism records expressions found to be unsuitable for speculative evaluation, and arranges for them to be evaluated more lazily in the future.We have implemented optimistic evaluation in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. The results are encouraging: many programs speed up significantly (5-25%), some improve dramatically, and none go more than 15% slower.

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Section: Speculative Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimistic evaluation

Ennals

Jones

2003

Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

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Parallel branch-and-bound search in Parlog

Huntbach

1991

Int J Parallel Prog

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The concurrent logic languages, of which Parlog is one, have been promoted as a new generation of software languages specifically designed for parallel programming. This paper investigates their apphcation to a search problem commonly used as an illustration of artificial intelligence techniques, the 8-puzzle. It notes that programs written in the concurrent logic languages which do not pay attention to the parallehsm can fall into two possible traps: either there is little real parallelism in them due to data dependencies, or there is too much parallelism and any practical architecture will be overwhelmed. A solution which controls the parallehsm using user-defined priorities is proposed. This solution has the advantage of being architecture-independent.

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