fowler@pyr.gatech.EDU (FREDERICK C. FOWLER) (02/25/88)
I am looking for information about some of the extensions to LISP that have been devised for parallel processing. I've already gotten quite a number of responses when I posted a question about MultiScheme in the scheme newsgroup; now I'd like to know what references I can use to learn about QLAMBDA, CLISP, PARLISP, Concurrent Common LISP, and any other concurrent extension to LISP. Thanks in advance for your help. Fred Fowler Room 414, Centennial Research Bldg Georgia Inst. of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332
weening@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU (Joe Weening) (02/25/88)
In article <5077@pyr.gatech.EDU>, fowler@pyr (FREDERICK C. FOWLER) writes: > > I am looking for information about some of the extensions to LISP that have >been devised for parallel processing. I've already gotten quite a number of >responses when I posted a question about MultiScheme in the scheme newsgroup; >now I'd like to know what references I can use to learn about QLAMBDA, CLISP, >PARLISP, Concurrent Common LISP, and any other concurrent extension to LISP. "Qlambda" has been officially renamed to Qlisp and work is in progress here in implementing it on an Alliant FX/8 and testing applications in the area of symbolic computation (a la Macsyma). The best available description of the language is a chapter by Dick Gabriel and John McCarthy in "Parallel Computation and Computers for Artificial Intelligence", edited by Janusz S. Kowalik (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). This book also discusses several other parallel AI languages and architectures. Unfortunately it is rather expensive ($58.95 at the Stanford bookstore). -- -- Joe Weening Internet: JSW@SAIL.Stanford.EDU Computer Science Dept. BITNET: JSW%SAIL.Stanford.EDU@Stanford Stanford University UUCP: {decwrl,uunet}!SAIL.Stanford.EDU!JSW
af@SPEECH2.CS.CMU.EDU (Alessandro Forin) (02/25/88)
In article <5077@pyr.gatech.EDU>, fowler@pyr.gatech.EDU (FREDERICK C. FOWLER) writes: > > I am looking for information about some of the extensions to LISP that have >been devised for parallel processing. I've already gotten quite a number of >responses when I posted a question about MultiScheme in the scheme newsgroup; >now I'd like to know what references I can use to learn about QLAMBDA, CLISP, >PARLISP, Concurrent Common LISP, and any other concurrent extension to LISP. > I do not know if it used to be called something else, but Multilisp is certainly another language you want to know about. It was designed by Robert Halstead at MIT, and it is based on the nice-and-easy idea of "futures" (e.g. a future is a placeholder for any Lisp expression that is evaluated in parallel). The language was described in the October 1985 issue of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and I believe also in the same book that was cited in a previous post on Qlisp. Implementations exist for the Concert multiprocessor (an MIT prototype) and other commercial multiprocessors such as the Encore Multimax, Vax 82xx 88xx, as well as uniprocessors like Suns, Vaxen, IBM-RT. There is also a simulator for a Lisp machine. Alessandro Forin Internet: af@speech2.cs.cmu.edu Computer Science Dept. BITNET: af%cs.cmu.edu@cmccvma Carnegie-Mellon University UUCP: {decwrl,uunet}!cs.cmu.edu!af