billo@cmx.npac.syr.edu (06/21/88)
There has been quite a bit of interest expressed in this group (and others) regarding parallel Lisps for parallel machines. I have been one of the people expressing interest, and am very thankful for all of you in Netland who helped me find the information I needed. I promised to post a summary of my findings, but once I started writing, the summary turned into a small technical report. This report has now been published in our (Northeast Parallel Architectures Center) newsletter so, rather than chew-up net bandwidth more than I already have, I would like to offer to send the report to anyone who is interested. Just email your Snail Mail address (you know, the one with street names, zip codes, and the like) to our newsletter editor (it's ok, I asked her if I could do this) at: editor@cmx.npac.syr.edu Please don't send your request to me, I'll just have to forward it to the editor. If you have trouble getting your email through, you could always try a postcard or letter addressed to: Newsletter Editor NPAC 250 Machinery Hall Syracuse University Syracuse NY 13244 Also, please feel free to request a subscription even if your interest in parallel computation is less specific than Lisp. Each issue (10 per year) has a technical report on some aspect of parallel computation. Here is what's covered in my report: 1) a brief introduction to Lisp. Sorry to all you Lispers (hi Bjorn) -- you'll just have to skip this section of the report. 2) an inordinately brief treatment of automatically parallelizing Lisps, like Parcel (for the Alliant), and Lisps with explicit synchronization mechanisms, like ZLISP (for the Ultracomputer). 3) fuller treatments of QLisp (Alliant), Multilisp (Encore Multimax), and *Lisp (Connection Machine). 4) mere mention of Multischeme, Schemes and Lisps for the BBN Butterfly, Linda Lisp (which is commercially available for transputers), CM Lisp (Connection Machine) and Paralation Lisp (Connection Machine, and possibly other architectures). 5) a relatively complete bibliography covering all of the above. (Aside: I have heard that at this summer's ACM Parallel Processing conference there will be a paper by Carriero and Gelernter (et al?) mentioning Linda-based Lisp. I couldn't get the details in time to include the reference in my bibliography.) Please note that the amount of space devoted in my tech. report to any given version of Lisp is not correlated with the importance of that version of Lisp. The only correlation is with my ignorance, combined with time and space restrictions. Also note that the mapping from Lisps to machines isn't really a partial function as seems to be implied by the above list -- those are just the high spots. The tech. report does not list the email addresses of whom you need to contact in order to get these Lisps, but if you send me a message (at billo@cmx.npac.syr.edu) saying which one(s) you're interested in, I'll send you any addresses that seem appropriate. I think posting them might be a bit presumptuous of me. If you know of any parallel Lisps not mentioned above, I would appreciate your letting me know. And thanks again to all those who responded to my parallel Lisp posting several weeks ago. Sorry for being so slow with my summary -- been a tad busy. Bill O'Farrell, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University