Coordination and Concurrency in Multi-engine Prolog

• Main Author: Tarau, Paul
• Other Authors: University of North Texas (UNT), Wolfgang Meuter, Gruia-Catalin Roman, TC 6, WG 6.1
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2011
• Subjects: multi-engine Prolog; agent coordination; high-level multi-threading; coroutining Linda blackboards; publish/subscribe; Java-based Prolog system; [INFO]Computer Science [cs]; [INFO.INFO-NI]Computer Science [cs]/Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01582990; https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01582990/document; https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01582990/file/978-3-642-21464-6_11_Chapter.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21464-6_11

International audience We discuss the impact of the separation of logic engines (independent logic processing units) and multi-threading on the design of coordination mechanisms for a Prolog based agent infrastructure.We advocate a combination of coroutining constructs with focus on expressiveness and a simplified, multi-threading API that ensures optimal use available parallelism.In this context, native multi-threading is made available to the application programmer as a set of high-level primitives with a declarative flavor while cooperative constructs provide efficient and predictable coordination mechanisms. As illustrations of our techniques, a parallel fold operation as well as cooperative implementations of Linda blackboards and publish/subscribe are described.