Objective and Issues

• Temptation: make use of all this potential.
• Problem: this can yield a slowdown or even erroneous results.
• Objective:
  • and/or-parallel execution of (some of the goals in) logic programs (and full Prolog, CLP, CC, ...)

  while

  • obtaining the same solutions as the sequential execution
    (i.e. correctness)

  • taking a shorter or equal execution time
    (i.e. efficiency: speedup or at least ``no-slowdown'' over state-of-the-art sequential systems).
    

• Above conditions may not always be met:
  • Independence: conditions that the run-time behavior of the goals must satisfy to guarantee correctness and efficiency (under ideal conditions - no overhead).

• The presence of overheads complicates things further (just because something can be run in parallel does not mean that it should be run in parallel):
  • Granularity Control: techniques for ensuring efficiency in the presence of overheads.