Exploiting Parallelism in Interactive Theorem Provers

This paper reports on the implementation and analysis of the MP reener, the rst parallel interactive theorem prover. The MP reener is a shared memory multi-processor implementation of the inference engine of Nuprl. The inference engine of Nuprl is called the reener. The MP reener is a collection of threads operating as sequential reeners running on separate processors. Concurrent tactics exploit parallelism by spawning tactics to be evaluated by other reener threads simultaneously. Tests conducted with the MP reener running on a four processor Sparc shared{ memory multi-processor reveal that parallelism at the inference rule level can signiicantly decrease the elapsed time of constructing proofs interactively .