The thesis next presents a parallel processing scheme for OPS5 production systems that allows some redundancy in the match computation. This redundancy enables the processing of a production to be divided into units of medium granularity each of which can be processed in parallel. Subsequently, a parallel processor architecture for implementing the parallel processing algorithm is presented. This architecture is based on an array of simple processors which can be clustered into groups of potentially different sizes, each group processing an affected production during a cycle of execution. Simulation results for a number of production systems indicate that the proposed algorithm performs better than other proposed massively parallel architectures like DADO, or NON-VON that use much larger number of processors. However, for certain systems, the performance is in the same range or sometimes worse than that can be obtained while a parallel interpreter based on Forgy's RETE algorithm such as an interpreter using production-level parallelism implemented on a small number of powerful processors, or an interpreter based on Gupta's parallel version of Forgy's RETE algorithm, implemented on a shared memory multiprocessor with 32 - 64 processors.
