Table Space Designs For Implicit and Explicit Concurrent Tabled Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper explores various table space designs for concurrent tabling in Prolog, addressing challenges in concurrency, memory management, and proposing future integrated frameworks for implicit and explicit evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes different table space designs for concurrent tabling, emphasizing lock-free data structures and memory management strategies in Prolog systems.

Findings

Designs balance concurrency and memory efficiency

Lock-free data structures improve performance

Future framework aims to unify implicit and explicit evaluation

Abstract

One of the main advantages of Prolog is its potential for the implicit exploitation of parallelism and, as a high-level language, Prolog is also often used as a means to explicitly control concurrent tasks. Tabling is a powerful implementation technique that overcomes some limitations of traditional Prolog systems in dealing with recursion and redundant sub-computations. Given these advantages, the question that arises is if tabling has also the potential for the exploitation of concurrency/parallelism. On one hand, tabling still exploits a search space as traditional Prolog but, on the other hand, the concurrent model of tabling is necessarily far more complex since it also introduces concurrency on the access to the tables. In this paper, we summarize Yap's main contributions to concurrent tabled evaluation and we describe the design and implementation challenges of several alternative table space designs for implicit and explicit concurrent tabled evaluation which represent different trade-offs between concurrency and memory usage. We also motivate for the advantages of using fixed-size and lock-free data structures, elaborate on the key role that the engine's memory allocator plays on such environments, and discuss how Yap's mode-directed tabling support can be extended to concurrent evaluation. Finally, we present our future perspectives towards an efficient and novel concurrent framework which integrates both implicit and explicit concurrent tabled evaluation in a single Prolog engine. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).