Experiments with subdivision of search in distributed theorem proving

We introduce the distributed theorem prover Peers-mcd for networks of workstations. Peers-mcd is the parallelization of the Argonne prover EQP, according to our Clause-Diffusion methodology for distributed deduction. The new features of Peers-mcd include the AGO (Ancestor-Graph Oriented) heuristic criteria for subdividing the search space among parallel processes. We report the performance of Peers-mcd on several experiments, including problems which require days of sequential computation. In these experiments Peers-mcd achieves considerable, sometime super-linear, speed-up over EQP. We analyze these results by examining several statistics produced by the provers. The analysis shows that the AGO criteria partitions the search space effectively, enabling Peers-mcd to achieve super-linear speed-up by parallel search.