A PARALLEL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE EQUIP EXPERT SYSTEM

We describe a parallel implementation of a subset of the EQUIP expert system. In EQUIP, diagnostic reasoning is applied to the domain of silicon chip production control. In order to diagnose all probable process faults that occurred in the manufacturing of IC's, the necessary computations in the inference part of the program become very time-consuming. To reduce this computation time, a parallel inference algorithm has been developed. We describe this inference algorithm and its parallel implementation in POOL-X. In the end some results will be shown using a multi-node computer.