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From: ram%shukra@Sun.COM (Renu Raman, Sun Microsystems)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Looking For Prolog Machines
Message-ID: <30115@sun.uucp>
Date: Tue, 6-Oct-87 12:54:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.30115
Posted: Tue Oct  6 12:54:56 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Oct-87 06:43:48 EDT
References: <454@trwspf.TRW.COM>
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Summary: Its closer to home and the best in the world

In article <454@trwspf.TRW.COM>, thomsen@trwspf.TRW.COM (Mark Thomsen) writes:
> 
> Help me on a search if you can.
> 
> In our laboratory we have considerable interest in running things quickly, and
> have developed and bought a number of fast non-general processors for
> implementing certain functions or languages quickly.  We are preparing to work
> with Prolog for some embedded expert and deductive processing functions, and
> I am not familiar with what can be purchased to run Prolog programs fast.  If
> left in our current state of ignorance, we will probably buy Modula-Prolog,
> put it on MC68020's (where we have an excellent Modula-2 compiler), and do our
> own speed enhancements.
> 
> What is out there that runs Prolog fast?  I have heard a little about the ICOT
> effort on PSI, but have not technical article or description.  I have also seen
> articles in the past on extracting concurrency, Concurrent Prolog, and the
> like -- are there concurrent Prolog machines?
> 
> I would like any references or descriptions on Prolog machines that you guys
> know of.  I will submit a summary of received data in a few weeks.  Thanks!
> 
> 
> 
>                                        Mark R. Thomsen

   
     I am sure somebody from UCB can comment on this better than I can, but
     here goes my pitch anyway.

     If you talk of prolog hardware - the fastest available today is from
     UCB called PLM. (Yeah! they are a few orders of magnitude faster than
     Japanese PSI - How about a university project out-performing a
     national project)  Al. Despain has been instrumental in its development
     and so are Dobry, Srini, P. Van Roy  & co.  The First Hardware was
     available thru Xenologic [X-1] which hooks onto a Sun VME backplane was
     performing at 300K lips and the new CMOS version is > 500K (maybe 800K.
     I think the PSI barely reaches 3 figures).  Apparently the new CMOS version
     (I don't know how true this is) is available as a MOSIS tape and
     you can probably license it and fabricate it.  There is a pretty
     efficient compiler that goes along with it (Written by Van Roy).
     I guess the new PLM hardware hooks onto an NCR (as it was developed
     thru an NCR grant).

     You may want to look at ECRC's ICM (There is a paper being presented by
     J.C.Syre in one of the conferences in Japan - forget the name now).
     I don't have figures about its performance - you could
     probably contact ECRC at Munich.

     Hope this helps.  Info given here are from sketchy info that I
     have gathered.  If there is any wrong info here - please correct me
     [I am sure Despain & Co. read this newsgroup].

---------------------
   Renu Raman				ARPA:ram@sun.com
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