NSF-CGP Science Fellowship Program: Parallelization and Implementation of Production Systems on the EM-4 Data-Flow Multiprocessor

9310972 Sohn Japan CGP Program: Parallelization and Implementation of Production Systems on the EM 4 Data Flow Multiprocessor This award will enable Dr. Andrew Sohn of the New Jersey Institute of Technology to conduct collaborative research with Dr. Kenji Nishida for three months at the Computer Science Division of the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. The team will investigate parallelism in production systems and implement a parallelized system on the EM 4 data flow multiprocessor. The Japanese Ministry of Industrial Trade and Industry currently funds a large multi institute project to develop a parallel processing computer system. As part of this project, the Electrotechnical Laboratory has designed and constructed four generations of experimental data flow multiprocessing machines. The fourth generation machine, EM 4, is comprised of 80 processors and is currently being tested by Dr. Nishida to determine whether it can effectively and quickly execute large and realistic problems. Utilizing Dr. Sohn's expertise in non numeric problems such as production system interpreters, Nishida and Sohn will parallelize two types of production systems, partition and assign the functions and data of those production systems to the mulitprocessor, and execute the systems. The team will evaluate the performance of the EM 4 and determine any improvements which would be needed to perform full scale real problems on the multiprocessor.