dourish@EuroPARC.Xerox.COM (Paul Dourish) (03/06/91)
Archive-name: languages/lisp/eulisp/1991-03-05 Original-posting-by: dourish@EuroPARC.Xerox.COM (Paul Dourish) Original-subject: Re: parallel lisp Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) In article <8861@castle.ed.ac.uk>, elee63@castle.ed.ac.uk (R Hamilton) writes: > In article <13658@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> yeh@cs.purdue.EDU (Wei Jen Yeh) writes: > > Does anyone know of a parallel lisp? Common lisp flavor is preferred.... > > > I've been looking for a good //el implementation for while. > As far as I know there isn't one (I say that in the hope that someone > will prove me wrong!) > The nearest I've seen (heard of) was a version of Betz's xlisp > running on Helios on a transputer array. Parallel Lisp is a research area (albeit a fairly active one). By that I mean that, while it's an area of considerable interest and work, it's by no means certain that you're going to find something that will suit your purposes. However, we can do better than transputer-specific systems. Most people working on parallel Lisp address specifically parallel machines, but there are often implementations which time-share on serial machines. There are various possible mechanisms for parallelising Lisp, though, and they differ greatly in approach and applicability. I'm presuming that the original poster wanted to run a parallel Lisp on a serial machine. Thinking Machines have a simulator for *Lisp (as used on the Connection Machine -- see Danny Hillis' book) which is available for anonymous ftp. Other interesting contenders are QLisp (Stanford) and Multilisp (MIT), although last time I looked neither of those were widely available for serial machines. It would be hard to imagine three systems which took more different approaches to parallelising Lisp! An early implementation of EuLisp, a Lisp dialect whose definition is currently being worked on by a CEC-sponsored group, incorporates a thread mechanism, and is freely available (to get a copy, try mailing eudist@maths.bath.ac.uk). It's not entirely Common Lisp-like; whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of debate. For Rob Hamilton, my own contribution is in the building next door (a Linda-based parallel Lisp running on the Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer)! -- Paul. -- Paul Dourish, Rank Xerox EuroPARC, Cambridge, UK <dourish@europarc.xerox.com> "Ain't they got no barbers where you come from, boy?"