In this work we investigate how different machine settings for a hardware Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) architecture affect
the performance of parallel logic programming (PLP) systems. We use execution-driven simulation of a DASH-like multiprocessor
to study the impact of the cache block size, the cache size, the network bandwidth, the write buffer size, and the coherence
protocol on the performance of Andorra-I, a PLP system capable of exploiting implicit parallelism in Prolog programs. Among
several other observations, we find that PLP systems favour small cache blocks regardless of the coherence protocol, while
they favour large cache sizes only in the case of invalidate-based coherence. We conclude that the cache block size, the cache
size, the network bandwidth, and the coherence protocol have a significant impact on the performance, while the size of the
write buffer is somewhat irrelevant.
Keywords DSM architectures - performance evaluation - logic programming