Performance measurements of a concurrent production system architecture without global synchronization

The use of the serializability criterion of correctness allows the elimination of global synchronization in production system machines. We present an extensive performance evaluation of a concurrent production system architecture that is based on serializability and takes advantage of modern associative memory devices to allow parallel production firing, concurrent matching, and overlap among matching, selection, and firing of productions. We study the cost effectiveness of associative memory components, and verify the conjecture that bus bandwidth is not a limitation in the architecture. A parallel machine that does global synchronization before every production firing is used as a reference for the comparative studies.