ICOT Evaluation Report
Evan Tick
Department of Computer Science
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403 USA
June 16, 1992
1 Introduction
This report summarizes my views of the Fifth Generation Project (FGCS) conducted at ICOT
over the period of 1982-1992. My participation is somewhat unique because I was both an
ICOT visitor in February 1987 and then a recipient of the first NSF-ICOT Visitors Program
grant, from September 1987-September 1988. I joined the University of Tokyo, in the Research
Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) at that time, with a visiting chair in
Information Science donated by the CSK Corp. Thus over the period of 1986-1989 I had an
"insider's view" of the FGCS Project. My area of research concerned performance evaluation
of parallel logic programming paradigms [12, 15, 8, 11, 9, 10, 17], primarily working with M.
Sato. I also worked on multiprocessor cache protocols with A. Goto and A. Matsumoto [3] and
compile-time estimation of task granularity in concurrent languages [7, 13]. During my stay at
ICOT I had the opportunity to begin writing a book describing then state-of-the-art approaches
to parallelization of logic programs [14].
Furthermore, my collaboration with ICOT researchers continued after my return to the U.S.
During that period, the primary research was in the area of parallel garbage collection (with A.
Imai [5, 4, 6]) and continued shared interest in distributed parallel algorithms, specifically for
the best path problem (with N. Ichiyoshi [16, 1, 2]). (I included a bibliography of my own work
associated with ICOT in order to convey the impact and importance on my own line of research.
Of course, ICOT members have published extensively and produced results in numerous areas.)
My experience as a Stanford post-doctoral research associate, working full-time at ICOT
in 1988, was very rewarding. I had previously worked at IBM Yorktown Heights (with T.
Agerwala and D. DeGroot), and at SRI Menlo Park (with D. H. D. Warren), and the ICOT
research environment and academic comraderie was on par with these institutions. Summaries
of the FGCS Project successes and failures by most foreign researchers tend to categorize the
abstract vision (of knowledge engineering and a focus on logic programming) as a great success
and the lack of commercially competitive hardware as the main failure. I would like to comment
on more subtle successes that fewer observers had a chance to evaluate. These successes, as
- 137 -
alluded to by Dr. Fuchi in some of his remarks in the Evaluation Workshop, Involve the training
of a generation of computer scientists.
2 A New Generation
In these preliminary remarks, I will not go into the numerous details and implications of this
"side effect" of the FGCS Project (I leave that detailed analysis for a journal article I am
preparing on the subject). I will summarize the main points as I see them from the vantage
point of working shoulder-to-shoulder with ICOT members.
1. increased communication culture - ICOT infrastructure was unique for Japanese research
groups in the early 1980's in that it supplied researchers with various communication
channels that normally did not exist in the corporate culture:
- company-to-company interaction engendered by the cooperative efforts of engineers
from several companies.
- electronic mail, increasing international as well as local information flow.
- company-to-university interaction engendered by the Working Groups (initiated at
the inception of the project). A related point is PhD production, discussed below.
I know best that Prof. Tanaka of the University of Tokyo has a close research re-
lationship to ICOT, working on design of inference multiprocessors and languages
throughout these past ten years. Other professors have also influenced and are influ-
enced by ICOT research.
- Japan-to-international research community interaction engendered by the high value
placed on the publication and presentation of research results.
2. post-graduate education - ICOT served as a substitute for OJT ("on-the-job training"),
and in doing so, graduated a generation of engineer/managers well educated in advanced
areas of computer science and better able to manage their own groups in the future. The
latter point applies to both the management of engineering groups as well as political
management, learned by a close relationship with MITI.
3. "corporate culture explosion" - I know of no other words to aptly describe the movement
away from the culture of lifetime employment. I believe that ICOT coincided with greater
forces within Japan causing this revolution; however, the revolution was certainly felt
within the FGCS Project. Several, not a few, ICOT members switched their affiliations
between companies and from companies to universities. If there was ever an Industry to
foster such a movement, it would certainly be a high-technology area such as computer
engineering, therefore this should not come as a surprise. However, I think it did catch
some of the companies by surprise.
- 138 -
4. PhD generation - ICOT generated an abnormally high (compared to comparable research
organizations within Japan, which is a difficult comparison to make) percentage of PhDs
from work conducted. Furthermore, it generated several professors, going to most of the
major Japanese universities, as well as others.
Complete analysis of these four points could take many pages, so I will only give my (un-
substantiated) opinions here. I think all these natural results of the "market forces" acting on
young ICOT researchers are positive. Increased communication between engineers, managers,
professors and students will lead to more rapid progress in developing basic research ideas into
successful commercial products. The question remains in my mind as to whether a National
Project of this magnitude is necessary to create these human networks each generation, or if this
first network will propagate itself without help from another project? It is reasonable to assume
a mixed success, i.e., the networks will weaken with age, but will remain in place. Thus in the
future, it may not require such a grand-scale project to strengthen ties. For example, current
ICOT graduates, understanding the importance of free and flexible discussion of results at na-
tional conferences, will increase the participation of the researchers in their care, thus enabling
the next generation to form their own friendships and working relationships.
3 About Technology
I will exploit this opportunity to discuss the validity or commercialization of the processing tech-
nologies developed by ICOT, specifically the idea of building a special-purpose multiprocessor
to execute a fine-grain concurrent language. This seems to be the main concern of the press,
and perhaps the key point upon which ICOT is being evaluated. One could criticize ICOT
for attempting to naively leapfrog "fourth generation" RISC-based microprocessor technologies,
which continue yearly to grow in performance. Ten years ago, Japanese companies did not have
experience developing microprocessor architectures, much less second-generation RISC designs
(superscalar), nor MIMD multiprocessor designs. Building the various PIM machines gave the
hardware manufactures some limited experience in microprocessor design, although presumably
this experience could have been had with a more conventional target.
On one level, however, the unique experience that was attained, i.e., that of fabricating
tagged symbolic architectures, contains much of the structure needed to tackle the problem
from the bottom-up, as being done by conventional multiprocessor vendors. It is not surprising
that operating systems are now developing light-weight threads, and that languages such as
object-oriented Smalltalk and tuple-based Linda form the cores of recent distributed processing
efforts. My contention is that these efforts are climbing from the bottom-up, whereas ICOT
had a top-down approach to the same problem (of massively parallel symbolic computation).
Furthermore, because I know firsthand of the quick responsiveness of Japanese research and
development in this area, I have little doubt that these two methods will be bridged. If the
performance gap is bridged, the key question is who will be in the better position?
- 139 -
The top-down approach has advantage of programming and application experience in con-
current and symbolic, high-level languages. The bottom-up approach has the advantage of using
imperative languages that evolved slowly, thus retaining market share. There is no clear answer
to this question, but let me rephrase it in terms of two specific technologies: wormhole-routed
distributed networks and concurrent constraint languages. I believe both required significant
intellectual efforts to conceptualize, design, implement, and apply in real systems. The former
represents a bottom-up technology and the latter a top-down technology. Bottom-up technolo-
gies are easier to introduce into designs, e.g., PIM/m incorporates wormhole routing (and can
execute GDCC, a constraint language), whereas the Intel machines do not yet have implementa-
tions of constraint languages. Perhaps GDCC can be ported to general-purpose multiprocessors,
but that is not the issue. Where GDCC came from, and where it is going, can only be deter-
mined from the foundation of the research expertise gained in its development. This is of course
true about routing technologies, but again, bottom-up technologies are more easily imported
(and more easily sold - they translate more directly to FLOPS).
4 Conclusions
I would like to finish this essay with a prescription for guaranteed success at generating the
positive "social" results of the FGCS experience. Much discussion at the Evaluation Workshop
concerned the issue of software - I think the distribution and availability of the great body
of work is valuable, but not the main issue. The main issue to making the FGCS Project a
"success" is to guarantee the high-level of computer science research initiated by ICOT. Shapiro
suggested giving grants to foreign institutes for collaborative efforts. A better idea, in my view,
would be to create a permanent Japanese Institute of Computer Science, which could accept
international visitors, company trainees, and hire directly from the universities. There may be
few proponents of this idea, primarily because of the game-theory effect that it appears to be
in no individual's best interest, i.e., not the universities (who have their own institutes), the
national labs, or the companies. However, taken in total, it would in fact benefit Japan because
a truly first-rate Institute, with an international reputation, would produce all the beneficial
effects of ICOT, without the pressure of producing advanced technology products in limited
time periods. The Institute would allow a unique opportunity for fresh university graduates to
tackle advanced problems in computer science with the support of industrial technologies. For
example, next-generation CPU and network designs are best produced with combined resources,
allowing the companies to develop their own current-generation designs.
References
[1] P. Adamson and E. Tick. Greedy Partitioned Algorithms for the Shortest-Path Problem.
International Journal of Parallel Programming, 20(4), August 1991.
- 140 -
[2] P. Adamson and E. Tick. Parallel Algorithms for the Single-Source Shortest-Path Problem.
In International Conference on Parallel Processing, Penn State, August 1992.
[3] A. Goto, A. Matsumoto, and E. Tick. Design and Performance of a Coherent Cache
for Parallel Logic Programming Architectures. In International Symposium on Computer
Architecture, pages 25-33. Jerusalem, IEEE Computer Society, May 1989.
[4] A. Imai and E. Tick. A Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Garbage Collector and its Eval-
uation for Committed-Choice Logic Programs. In Symposium on Parallel and Distributed
Processing, pages 870-877. Dallas, IEEE Computer Society, December 1991.
[5] A. Imai and E. Tick. Evaluation of Parallel Copying Garbage Collection on a Shared-
Memory Multiprocessor. In Proceedings Japanese Symposium of Parallel Processing. Tokyo,
May 1991.
[6] A. Imai and E. Tick. Evaluation of Parallel Copying Garbage Collection on a Shared-
Memory Multiprocessor. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing, 1992.
[7] E. Tick. Compile-Time Granularity Analysis of Parallel Logic Programming Languages. In
International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems, pages 994-1000, Tokyo,
November 1988. ICOT.
[8] E. Tick. Performance of Parallel Logic Programming Architectures. Technical Report
TR-421, ICOT, Tokyo, September 1988.
[9] E. Tick. A Performance Comparison of AND- and OR-Parallel Logic Programming Archi-
tectures. In International Conference on Logic Programming, pages 452-470. Lisbon, MIT
Press, June 1989.
[10] E. Tick. Comparing Two Parallel Logic-Programming Architectures. IEEE Software, 6(4),
July 1989.
[11] E. Tick. Parallel Logic Programming on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors: A Tale of N-
Queens. In Proceedings Japanese Symposium of Parallel Processing. Atami, February 1989.
[12] E. Tick. A Performance Comparison of Shared-Memory OR- and AND-Parallel Logic
Programming Architectures for a Common Benchmark. Journal of Information Processing,
13(1), 1990.
[13] E. Tick. Compile-Time Granularity Analysis of Parallel Logic Programming Languages.
New Generation Computing, 7(2):325-337, January 1990.
[14] E. Tick. Parallel Logic Programming. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1991.
[15] E. Tick and J. A. Crammond. Comparison of Two Shared-Memory Emulators for Flat
Committed-Choice Logic Programs. In International Conference on Parallel Processing,
volume 2, pages 236-242, Penn State, August 1990.
- 141 -
[16] E. Tick and N. Ichiyoshi. Programming Techniques for Efficiently Exploiting Parallelism
in Logic Programming Languages. In SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practices
of Parallel Programming, pages 31-39, Seattle, March 1990. ACM Press.
[17] E. Tick and K. Susaki. TOESP: A Prolog Benchmark. Technical Memo TM-451, ICOT,
l-4-28 Mita, Minato-ku Tokyo 108, Japan, January 1988.
- 142 -