An integrated prolog architecture for symbolic and numeric executions

Numerically intensive calculations are not well supported by Prolog, yet there are important applications that require tightly coupled symbolic and numeric calculations. The Aquarius Numeric Processor (ANP) is an extended numeric Instruction Set Architecture based on the Berkeley Programmed Logic Machine (PLM) to support integrated symbolic and numeric calculations. This extension expands the existing numeric data type to include 32- and 64-bit integers, and single and double precision floating-point numbers conforming to the IEEE Standard P754. A new class of data structure, numeric arrays, is added to represent matrices and arrays found in most scientific programming languages. Powerful numeric instructions are included to manipulate the new data types. Dynamic type checking and coercing of operands are done. The ANP and PLM together provide for the efficient execution for symbolic and numeric operations written in AI languages such as Prolog and Lisp. Simulated performance results indicate the system will achieve about 10 MFLOPs on the Prolog version of some Whetstone and Linpack benchmarks and close to 20 MFLOPS on some matrix operations (all in double precision).