Volume 17, 1998, No. 4


structured plans with sharing and replication

M. Balaban, S.E. Shimony

Abstract. This paper focuses on the issue of shared (vs. replicated) tasks in hierarchical plan description. We extend the notion of task networks (or plan schemas) with constraint expressions, which determine which sub-plans may be shared among parent plans, which must be shared, and which must be replicated (that is,  consist of disjoint events) in the plant schema. The semantics of constraint expressions are defined by using an intermediate, simplified, level of plans, and a base level of structured events (concrete, "real-world" events). Applications for this representation are in planning, plan recognition, and in databases of plans and schedules. In all these areas, the possibility of representing a large number of events with common structure compactly, provided by the plan schemas, is beneficial.

 

optimal diagnostic examination for local diagnosis

R. Trobec

Abstract. The paper deals with mesh-connected massively-parallel systems affected by failures. The complexity of a local diagnosis procedure, based on new definitions of the local k-diagnosability and the r-fault-tolerance, is analysed. It depends on distances between individual fault clusters and on fault cluster diameters. In particular cases the minimum distance between fault clusters can be enlarged on the account of the maximum fault cluster diameter, e.g., by merging the two clusters. The criterion function for the optimal diagnostic examination for local diagnosis is proposed.

 

NUTS: a distributed object-oriented platform with high level communication functions

V. Vlassov, M. Addibpour, E. Tyugu

Abstract. An extensible object-oriented platform NUTS for distributed computing is described which is based on an object-oriented programming environment NUT which supports automatic synthesis of programs.  It is built on top of the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), and hides all low-level features of the latter. The language of NUTS is a concurrent object-oriented programming language with coarse-grained parallelism and distributed shared memory communication model implemented on a distributed memory architecture. It differs from other languages of concurrent programming in the following: concurrent processes are represented by packages which are semantically richer entities than objects, inter-process communication is performed in terms of classes, objects, scripts and packages, using the EDA communication model; processes can be arranged  into structured collections: grids which enable to program data-parallel computations on a high level; sequential segments of programs can be synthesized automatically from specifications represented as classes using the program synthesis features of NUT.  Examples of usage of generic parallel computing control structures PARDIF and PARARR are given.

 

execution models for a massively parallel prolog implementation. Part I.

P. Kacsuk

Abstract. The Generalized Dataflow Model is introduced for OR- and pipeline AND-parallel execution of logic programs. A higher level abstraction of the dataflow model called the Logicflow Model is applied to implement Prolog on massively parallel distributed memory computers. Properties of the Logicflow Model concerning the logic programming execution scheme are proved in detail. Based on the two execution models the Distributed Data Driven Prolog Abstract Machine (3DPAM) can be defined. It is shown how the  3DPAM are derived from the dataflow and logicflow nodes in the case of alternative clauses.

 

a workload characterization by clustering technique

B. Paternoster, M. Sessa

Abstract. An improvement of a method for the characterization of computer workload by means of arrival patterns is presented. A numerical fitting technique provides a suitable representation of the arrival rate function of jobs over one day period. In order to classify such arrival patterns, we suggest the application of the MacQueen algorithm with coarsening and refining parameters [2], which does not need the number of clusters to be fixed a priori, as in the original approach [4]. Solutions for some numerical problems related to the approximation of the arrival rate function are also provided. The proposed technique has been implemented and experimental results concerning the workload characterization of an educational system are given.

 

An efficient algorithm for testing propositional formulas

M. Vlada

Abstract. The determinant of the Boolean Formulae a = {C1,…,Cm} was introduced in [1]. The present paper gives an algorithm for testing satisfiably propositional formulas. The algorithm based on the enumeration of solutions for testing the satisfiability of propositional formulas has already been given by Kazuo Iwama [2]. The present paper is original by combining this algorithm  with other procedures, especially with the pure-literal rule and the one-literal rule, and also the one which consists in changing any formulas in bounded formulas. The algorithm based on the enumeration of the solution combined to these procedures is more efficient.


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