Exploiting parallelism in the ME calculus

13 pages•Published: August 19, 2013

Abstract

We present some parallelization techniques for the Model Evolution (ME) calculus,
an instantiation-based calculus that lifts the DPLL procedure
to first-order clause logic.

Specifically, we consider a restriction of ME to the EPR fragment
of clause logic for which the calculus is a decision procedure.
The main operations in ME's proof procedures, namely clause instantiation
and candidate literal generation, offer opportunities for MapReduce-style
parallelization.

This term/clause-level parallelization is largely orthogonal to the sort
of search-level parallelization performed by portfolio approaches.
We describe a hybrid parallel proof procedure for the restricted calculus
that exploits parallelism at both levels to synergistic effect.
The calculus and the proof procedure have been implemented in
a new solver for EPR formulas.

Our initial experimental results show that our term/clause-level parallelization
alone is effective in reducing runtime and can be combined
with a portfolio-based approach to maximize performance.

Keyphrases: instantiation based calculi, model evolution, parallel theorem proving

In: Pascal Fontaine, Renate A. Schmidt and Stephan Schulz (editors). PAAR-2012. Third Workshop on Practical Aspects of Automated Reasoning, vol 21, pages 96-108.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/WdR
	https://doi.org/10.29007/v1f2