On Scaling Dynamic Programming Problems with a Multithreaded Tabling System

Miguel Areias and Ricardo Rocha

October 2014


Abstract

Tabling is a recognized and powerful implementation technique that improves the declarativeness and expressiveness of traditional Prolog systems in dealing with recursion and redundant computations. In a nutshell, tabling consists of storing intermediate answers for subgoals so that they can be reused when a variant subgoal appears. The tabling technique can thus be viewed as a natural tool to implement dynamic programming problems, where a general recursive strategy divides a problem in simple sub-problems that, often, are the same. When tabling is combined with multithreading, we have the best of both worlds, since we can exploit the combination of higher declarative semantics with higher procedural control. However, such combination for dynamic programming problems is very difficult to exploit in order to achieve execution scalability as we increase the number of running threads. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work showed to be able to scale the execution of multithreaded dynamic programming problems. In this work, we focus on two well-known dynamic programming problems, the Knapsack and the Longest Common Subsequence problems, and we discuss how we were able to scale their execution by taking advantage of the multithreaded tabling engine of the Yap Prolog system.

Bibtex

@InProceedings{areias-seps14,
  author =    {M. Areias and R. Rocha},
  title =     {{On Scaling Dynamic Programming Problems with a Multithreaded Tabling System}},
  booktitle = {1st Workshop on Software Engineering for Parallel Systems (SEPS 2014)},
  pages =     {103--114},
  editor =    {A. Jannesari and W. F. Tichy and F. Wolf},
  month =     {October},
  year =      {2014},
  address =   {Portland, Oregon, USA},
}

Download Paper

PDF file
RWTH Aachen University