COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

Gopal Gupta hosted Peter Kacsuk for two weeks in 1999 at NMSU. Dr. Kacsuk is a professor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Computer and Automation Research Institute (MTA SZTAKI) in Budapest, Hungary, and during his stay in the United States, he worked in the NMSU Laboratory for Logic, Databases, and Advanced Programming. His visit allowed Drs. Gupta and Kacsuk to lay the groundwork for a research project on constraint logic programming (CLP) which they hope to continue in greater detail in the future. CLP uses efficient techniques for solving problems that include large searches by computer. However, even after the efficient techniques are utilized, the search space can still be very large. These systems generally utilize distributed memory multiprocessors or shared memory multiprocessors.

Each has worked with CLP at his respective university. Dr. Gupta’s lab has been building parallel logic programming systems for the last thirteen years, resulting in the ACE parallel Prolog system. This system exploits both forms of parallelism found in parallel logic programming--or-parallelism as well as and-parallelism. This system is limited to shared memory multiprocessors, which are not scalable. Consequently, parallelism is also limited. The Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Systems at SZTAKI has been running a parallel and distributed Prolog implementation project called the LOGFLOW system since 1992. In order to develop distributed Prolog programs, the graphical program development environments called MOGUL and GRADE have been created as well. The two labs plan to work together on common problems and use the knowledge they have gained individually to further the project. They hope eventually to build a unified parallel constraint logic programming system that seamlessly runs on a distributed network of shared memory multiprocessors. They have already begun work on a proposal to the NSF to continue their collaboration.