Parallel Logic Programs on the HP Mayfly
John Conery
Technical Report(Dec 1990)
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The Mayfly, a parallel processor being built at HP Labs in Palo Alto, has architectural support for several important aspects of the OM virtual machine for parallel logic program. Each node has a coprocessor that is able to relieve the main processor of a significant amount of the "housekeeping" work of memory management, task switching, and message handling. This paper describes how the coprocessor implements kernel level functions in OM, with particular attention to the operations that support task switching. The paper includes detailed timing data from a program with interleaved parallel threads to show that while the main processor is busy in one thread the coprocessor can effectively building the context for the next thread.