Achievements of the FGCS Project 


Introduction 

The achievements the FGCS project have been formed around the project's 
technical backbone of parallel logic programming. Major achievements have 
also been integrated into the FGCS prototype system, which is an actual 
operational system, and there usability and effectiveness have been examined 
and evaluated by applying them to practical application problems. 

As a consequence of successful evaluation results, it has been proved that the 
project has established the basic technologies for building large-scale parallel 
knowledge processing systems which could not be attained by simple extension 
of any conventional sequential computer technologies oriented to numerical 
computation. 

The achievements provide the new technologies that follow; 

Large-scale parallel symbol processing 


The parallel logic language, KL1, enables us to efficiently and freely pro-
duce parallel programs of knowledge or symbol processing application 
problems with irregular computational structures without concern for de-
tailed system restrictions. 

Thus, this makes it possible to quickly develop application programs which 
make full use of parallel machines with hundreds to thousands of proces-
sors. 

The parallel inference machine, which executes KL1 programs efficiently, 
is now providing the most powerful symbol processing capability in the 
world, using about 1,000 processors in total. 

The parallel operating system, PIMOS, is the first truly practical parallel 
operating system. It has the capability to control dynamic load-balancing 
and data reallocation for large-scale parallel or distributed systems. It is 
basically applicable in systems with to a million processors. The tech-
nology of PIMOS as well as of the KL1 language processor is generally 
applicable to most MIMD-type parallel machines. 


High-level knowledge information processing 


New methodologies to describe knowledge information with a logical for-


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