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From: georgej@Franz.COM (George Jacob)
Subject: Re: Multithreading
In-Reply-To: lgm@polaris.ih.att.com's message of Sun, 13 Nov 1994 23:34:10 GMT
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Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 20:36:19 GMT
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In article <LGM.94Nov13173410@polaris.ih.att.com> lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka) writes:

   As I recall, Top Level's implementation of Common Lisp supported
   "real" multithreading.  Unfortunately, Top Level apparently did not
   survive, and I don't think any remaining vendor picked up their
   technology.  I believe Franz used to offer "real" multithreading on a
   particular platform (Sequent?), but I don't know if Franz still
   supports that implementation, or ever attempted to port it to more
   popular platforms.

Your recollection is correct.  Top Level's parallel Common Lisp,
created primarily by Kelly Murray, did not survive and has not been
picked up on.  It ran on a variety of platforms and had a
sophisticated user interface.  Lucid, in a joint effort with a group
at Stanford, had a parallel Lisp named QLisp (a Gabriel/McCarthy
brainchild), which ran on the Alliant but was never commercialized.

Franz's Allegro Common Lisp in Parallel (CLiP), based on the UC
Berkeley SPUR Lisp design, was only implemented on the Sequent
Symmetry, and is no longer a supported product.  For the record, users
noticed reasonably linear speedup (upto 10 processors), although the
garbage-collection was not parallelized.  Given the plethora of
parallel Lisp implementations, my take on the fact that none are
currently available is more a statement on market conditions than
technical difficulty, outside of the parallel GC issue.

For references on the three CL-based parallel Lisps mentioned above,
see proceedings of the Europal '90 conference (Cambridge, UK) and the
Europal Parallel Lisp Workshop (Nov. '90, Twickenham, UK).

---------------------------------------------------------------
George Jacob                      Internet: georgej@franz.com
Franz Inc.,                       http:     //www.franz.com/
1995 University Avenue,           Phone:    (510) 548-3600
Berkeley, CA 94704.               FAX:      (510) 548-8253
	ACL Unix    FAQ: ftp.uu.net:/vendor/franz/faq
	ACL Windows FAQ: ftp.uu.net:/vendor/franz/acl4w-faq
---------------------------------------------------------------

-- 

---------------------------------------------------------------
George Jacob                      Internet: georgej@franz.com
Franz Inc.,                       http:     //www.franz.com/
1995 University Avenue,           Phone:    (510) 548-3600
Berkeley, CA 94704.               FAX:      (510) 548-8253
	ACL Unix    FAQ: ftp.uu.net:/vendor/franz/faq
	ACL Windows FAQ: ftp.uu.net:/vendor/franz/acl4w-faq
---------------------------------------------------------------
