Implementation of Production Systems on Message-Passing Computers

AbstructIn the past, researchers working on parallel implementations of production systems have focused on sharedmemory multiprocessors and special-purpose architectures. Message-passing computers have not been given as much attention. The main reasons for this have been the large messagepassing latency (as large as a few milliseconds) and high message-handling overheads (several hundred microseconds) associated with the first generation message-passing computers. These overheads were too large for parallel implementations of production systems, which require a fine-grain decomposition to obtain a significant speedup. Recent advances in interconnection network technology and processing element design, however, promise to reduce the network latency and message-handling overhead by 2-3 orders of magnitude, making these computers much more interesting for implementation of production systems. In this paper, we examine the suitability of message-passing computers for parallel implementations of production systems. We present two mappings for production systems on these computers, one targeted toward fine-grained message-passing machines and the other targeted toward medium-grained machines. We also present simulation results for the mediumgrained mapping and show that it is possible to exploit the available parallelism and to obtain reasonable speedups. Finally, we perform a detailed analysis of the results and suggest solutions for some of the problems.