We are trying to understand the interaction between hardware design, operating system style, and programming style as the hardware and software technologies evolve. The Institute for New Generation Computer Technology installed two of the PSI-II logic programming computers in October 1990. Similar pairs of machines have been installed at Argonne National Laboratory and lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Collaborative visits and workshops were held throughout the year to begin the formulation of molecular, genetic and biological problems. The molecular-level problem selected as being most important was the modeling of the folding of proteins. Several prototype logic programs were developed to test different protein representations. The genetic information problem selected was the construction of a prototype system which related sequence, genetic and map databases. Discussions concerning models of cellular structure and development were held but it seemed too early to attempt a computer model. Logic programming is a new powerful tool for developing prototype systems. The PSI II machine which is at the end of its effective life will be replaced with the PSI III machine which runs a conventional Open Software Foundation (OSF) operating environment. Investigations were made to determine if a graphical programming environment would make the power of logic programming available to typical scientific programmers. The Advanced Visualization System (AVS) and a commercial graphical programming language Prograph were found to have the requisite ease of learning and use. The collaborators at ICOT are considering ways of implementing these packages on the new PSI III machines. The ICOT collaborators have approached parallelism of computation using logic programming techniques. In this project we have made an attempt to learn and apply logic programming. Older programming approaches must essentially be discarded and problems must be re-thought in order to develop a successful implementation.
