Design of a Resolution Multiprocessor for the Parallel Virtual Machine

PAN is a process based Prolog system running in a distributed manner on the nodes of a virtual multiprocessor. It was designed to be a general purpose parallel logic programming system that would be resilient to software and hardware evolution. Programs can explicitly control parallelism through passing general terms synchronously or asynchronously among PAN’s Prolog engines. Alternatively several forms of parallelism can be implicitly extracted by compilation techniques and runtime scheduling on top of this architecture. The computational platform or Parallel Virtual Machine is a meshed set of daemons on a network of heterogeneous workstations offering common message passing, configuration and job control services. PAN is presented to users under X Window as a multi-headed extension of single processor Prolog systems. An interface to each Prolog engine is displayed in a separate X widget together with a console window to the PVM, and window based methods are supported for simultaneously invoking all engines together.