Analysis of experimental Prolog-database hardware

A special-purpose machine called the Prolog processor board (PPB), constructed specifically to carry out experimental evaluation of dedicated hardware support for the logic programming language Prolog, is presented. A detailed analysis of the PPB hardware performance profile is carried out. Machine-level analyses include memory consumption and memory referencing behavior together with instruction frequencies and execution times. System architecture measurements include variable use, data structure referencing characteristics, and program execution time, as well as a breakdown of the time spent on fundamental operations of Prolog. Conclusions are drawn from these experiments regarding bottlenecks in the execution of programs on real dedicated hardware. It is found that the PPB is limited by the available memory-bus bandwidth, and that mechanisms for reducing memory traffic can be cost effective. The detailed analysis also leads to accurate estimates of system performance when the identified bottlenecks are removed