PALS: Efficient Or-Parallelism on Beowulf Clusters
  This paper describes the development of the PALS system, an implementation of Prolog capable of efficiently exploiting or-parallelism on distributed-memory platforms--specifically Beowulf clusters. PALS makes use of a novel technique, called incremental stack-splitting. The technique proposed builds on the stack-splitting approach, previously described by the authors and experimentally validated on shared-memory systems, which in turn is an evolution of the stack-copying method used in a variety of parallel logic and constraint systems--e.g., MUSE, YAP, and Penny. The PALS system is the first distributed or-parallel implementation of Prolog based on the stack-splitting method ever realized. The results presented confirm the superiority of this method as a simple yet effective technique to transition from shared-memory to distributed-memory systems. PALS extends stack-splitting by combining it with incremental copying; the paper provides a description of the implementation of PALS, including details of how distributed scheduling is handled. We also investigate methodologies to effectively support order-sensitive predicates (e.g., side-effects) in the context of the stack-splitting scheme. Experimental results obtained from running PALS on both Shared Memory and Beowulf systems are presented and analyzed. 
Enrico Pontelli (1), Karen Villaverde (1), Hai-Feng Guo (2), Gopal   Gupta (3) ((1) New Mexico State University, (2) Univers...