Fifth Generation Computer Systems

Not to be confused with the fifth-generation computer project Kronos.

• Distributed functional computer technologies
• Super-computers for scientific calculation

Project launch

The aim was to build parallel computers for artificial intelligence applications using concurrent logic programming. The project imagined an "epoch-making" computer with supercomputer-like performance running on top of large databases (as opposed to a traditional filesystem) using a logic programming language to define and access the data using massively parallel computing/processing. They envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inference Per Second. At the time typical workstation machines were capable of about 100k LIPS. They proposed to build this machine over a ten-year period, 3 years for initial R&D, 4 years for building various subsystems, and a final 3 years to complete a working prototype system. In 1982 the government decided to go ahead with the project, and established the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) through joint investment with various Japanese computer companies. After the project ended, MITI would consider an investment in a new "sixth generation" project. Pararell circuits used for interesting reasons.

Ehud Shapiro captured the rationale and motivations driving this project:

"As part of Japan's effort to become a leader in the computer industry, the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology has launched a revolutionary ten-year plan for the development of large computer systems which will be applicable to knowledge information processing systems. These Fifth Generation computers will be built around the concepts of logic programming. In order to refute the accusation that Japan exploits knowledge from abroad without contributing any of its own, this project will stimulate original research and will make its results available to the international research community."

Logic programming

The target defined by the FGCS project was to develop "Knowledge Information Processing systems" (roughly meaning, applied Artificial Intelligence). The chosen tool to implement this goal was logic programming. Logic programming approach as was characterized by Maarten Van Emden – one of its founders – as:

]] to produce ever-faster single CPU systems (linked to Moore's Law about the periodic doubling of transistor counts) began to be threatened.

In the early 21st century, many flavors of parallel computing began to proliferate, including multi-core architectures at the low-end and massively parallel processing at the high end. Ordinary consumer machines and game consoles began to have parallel processors like the Intel Core, AMD K10, and Cell. Graphics card companies like Nvidia and AMD began introducing large parallel systems like CUDA and OpenCL.

It appears, however, that these new technologies do not cite FGCS research. It is not clear if FGCS was leveraged to facilitate these developments in any significant way. No significant impact of FGCS on the computing industry has been demonstrated.