cipin@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Lubo Cipin) (11/25/89)
We are currently running 1108's, and are considering acquiring SUNs
for the primary purpose of extending the life of our existing lisp
programs. A secondary consideration is improving the performance
running Xerox Lisp.
Some questions that I have at the moment:
- Were there any compatibility problems from 1108
Lyric to Sun Medley?
Should it work just out of the box?
- We are using Xerox Character Code Standard fonts
outside of CS0. Are all fonts supported
in the same way under Medley Sun?
- How much memory is "enough" to get a reasonable
improvement in performance over the 1108's?
- Which models do you (don't you) recommend?
3/60, 3/80, ... , Sparcstation1, ...
Is this a smart move? We have very limited financial resources, so
we would like to get the best cost/performance ratio, as well as not
wasting our money. We have a lot of time invested in our software for
the 1108's, so we would like to extend the life of the software. If and
when Xerox Lisp fades away, we are still left with the Sun platform for
Unix. I can't say the same for 1108's. :-) [maybe that should be :-(]
So, please recount any experience you may have with Medly on the Sun.
Please Email your replies to lubo@doe.utoronto.ca. I will summarize if
there is sufficient interest.
Thanks in advance.
--Lubo Cipin
___________________________________________________________________________
uucp: ...!uunet!attcan!utzoo!utdoe!lubo | Lubo Cipin
Internet/BITNET: lubo@doe.utoronto.ca | The Dictionary of
| Old English Project
Phone: +1 416 978 8883 | University of Toronto, CANADA
awb@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Alan Black) (12/01/89)
In article <1989Nov24.221715.11245@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> lubo@doe.utoronto.ca writes: >We are currently running 1108's, and are considering acquiring SUNs >for the primary purpose of extending the life of our existing lisp >programs. A secondary consideration is improving the performance >running Xerox Lisp. Where I used to work, Centre for Speech Technology Research here at Univ Edinburgh, we have used xerox machines (1108. 1109 and 1186) for years but recently decided to move towards suns. I evaluated a number of different lisp systems for the sun including Sun Medley, Allegro Common Lisp, and Harlequin LispWorks. Here are some comments I wrote on Sun Medley 1.1: This was installed on a Sun4/110 with 8Megabyte of memory. This product runs as a (very) large unix process, which effectively takes over the whole machine. It implements a full emulator for xerox sysouts. This in itself is very impressive. After basic installation, I copied the our local sysout from the file server and ran that as the default sysout on the Sun4. The effect for almost all purposes is that the Sun4 becomes an 1186. The keyboard and mouse are a different shape but everything is the same, bugs and all. I tried running code generated on my own 1186 to get timings. The result was that for small and medium sized tasks, the timings were the same. However if I copy the common lisp code and compile and run it on kcl on the Sun (as a unix machine) it runs about 7 times faster. Recompiling the code on the Sun running medley made no difference to to speed. When very large processes are run on the Sun4 under medley it begins to show its value. For processes that use lots of space and are running for a long time (more than 12 hours), the Sun4 was almost twice the speed of the 1186. This is because the Sun4 had 8M of memory (the 1186 has 3.7M). Also it should be added that this task would not run in kcl on the Sun4 (unix) in reasonable time because the Sun's paging algorithm is not tuned to lisp. However if the money spent on the Medley system was spent on more memory for the Sun you would end up with a machine 7 times faster than the 1186. Medley on a Sun seemed to take away all the advantages of moving to Suns. I did try to see if you could run a window manager and a medley sysout at the same time. This did not seem possible. You can stop the medley system and restart it, running a window manager in between, but you have to exit the window manger to return to medley as there is no way to stop a window manager and all its children (gracefully). Thus my conclusions are, yes this offers a full 1186 programming environment on a Sun4 (it should be faster on a Sun4/330). The 1186 programming environment is still the best I have seen anywhere. But it effectively excludes the use of many of the UNIX facilities we want. (Converting our code to general common lisp was a feasible thing to do for us, so other common lisp environments were possible alternatives to medley on a sun) I have heard that it does indeed run faster on the newer sparcstations but not as fast as running a Common Lisp under Unix. Note that 1109's are faster than 1186 (I think) but I can't remember about 1108's). Now to answer your questions more specifically: > - Were there any compatibility problems from 1108 > Lyric to Sun Medley? > Should it work just out of the box? I was impressed, I installed it and once I got our standard sysout all worked, no recompiling necessary. CHAT was a little different and anything that used the TCP/IP stuff but basic Common Lisp/ Interlisp stuff seemed ok. We sort of skipped Lyric, So I can't really comment on the Lyric to Sun medley compatability, only Medley to Sun Medley. > - We are using Xerox Character Code Standard fonts > outside of CS0. Are all fonts supported > in the same way under Medley Sun? I don't really know about this, but as far I understand it the sun medley stuff makes the sun into an 1186 all stuff as before, though the screen quality is better on the sun (see notes above) > - How much memory is "enough" to get a reasonable > improvement in performance over the 1108's? I tested it on an 8M machine, the more the better I think, but the performance was better (though not much) than an 1186. I think that sun medley requires a little less memory than the other common lisp environments (e.g. Allegro and Lispworks) as medley does its memory management better though at a price of being slower for simple code (i.e. code not involving a lot of paging). > - Which models do you (don't you) recommend? > 3/60, 3/80, ... , Sparcstation1, ... They do say it runs on sun3s though I am little wary of this. I have only heard about it running on sun4/110s and sparcstations. I had heard (from a salesman) that on a sun3 (not sure if thats a 3/80 or 3/60) it runs at the about the same speed too. (I wonder what they are doing with all those extra mips on a sun4). Note that these are *my* experiences for running *my* code (a large and complex speech recogniser system). It may be completely different for your system. I suggest you try and get an evaluation copy and play with it. Here in the UK, they (AI Limited) seemed quite good about that. Alan Alan W Black 80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, UK Dept of Artificial Intelligence tel: (+44) -31 225 7774 x236 University of Edinburgh email: awb@ed.ac.uk