Reference: Okuno, H. G. & Gupta, A. Parallel Execution of OPS5 in QLISP. 1988.
Abstract: Production systems (or rule-based systems) are widely used for the development of expert systems. To speed-up the execution of production systems, a number of different approaches are being taken, a majority of them being based on the use of parallelism. In this paper, we explore the issues involved in the parellel implementation of OPS5 (a widly used production system language) in QLISP (a parallel dialect of Lisp proposed by John McCarthy and Richard Gabriel). This paper shows that QLISP can easily encode most sources of parallelism in OPS5 that have been previously discussed in literature. This is significant because the OPS5 interpreter is the first large program to be encoded in QLISP, and as a result, this is the first practical demonstration of the expressive power of QLISP. The paper also lists the most commonly used QLISP constructs in the parallel implementation (and the contexts in which they are used), which serve as a hint to the QLISP implementor about what to optimize. We also discuss the exploitation of the speculative parallelism in RHS-evaluation for OPS5. This has not been previously discussed in the literature.
Notes: STAN-CS-87-1166.