Architectural support for the management of tightly-coupled fine-grain goals in Flat Concurrent Prolog

Architectural support is proposed for goal management as part of a special-purpose processor architecture for the efficient execution of Flat Concurrent Prolog. Goal management operations, namely, halt, spawn, suspend, and commit, are decoupled from goal reduction and overlapped in the goal management unit. Their efficient execution is enabled using a goal cache. The authors evaluate the performance of the goal management support using an analytic performance model and program parameters characteristic of the system´s development workload. Most goal management operations are completely overlapped, resulting in a speedup of 2. Higher speedups are obtained for workloads that exhibit greater goal management complexity.