gcl-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[Gcl-devel] Re: I wish I'd never met Lisp


From: Camm Maguire
Subject: [Gcl-devel] Re: I wish I'd never met Lisp
Date: 21 Jun 2004 11:43:51 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.lang.lisp as well.

Greetings!

address@hidden (Rob Warnock) writes:

> Paul F. Dietz <address@hidden> wrote:
> +---------------
> | Edward Jason Riedy wrote:
> | > I wasn't maligning the Altix line; they're damned impressive.  
> | > I was noting that I'm not aware of an optimized, compiled Lisp 
> | > for it.  Am I wrong?  I'd love to be wrong...  (I don't have 
> | > access to an Altix at the moment, but it's a target.)
> | 
> | Is that one of the debian targets?  gcl is compiled and runs on all
> | the debian target architectures.
> +---------------
> 
> Hmmm... According to <URL:http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/configs.html>
> they only support "SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 + Service Pack 3", and
> that only with "SGI ProPack" added. Does GCL run on SuSE? In 64-bit mode?
> 

>From what I can see, these altix boxes are Itanium 2 Linux machines,
and gcl should compile out of the box on same, regardless of Linux
'flavor'.  On Debian ia64, gcl provides the base for maxima, acl2, and
axiom, each of which pass all their own internal regression tests.
There are users of very large gcl images on multiprocessor Itanium
machines with a lot of memory in which more than 1 billion cons
elements can be allocated -- these users are primarily interested in
acl2 there.  GCL also compiles out of the box on SuSE amd64 with the
same results as above, should you be wondering about SuSE.

You should note that gcl uses dlopen to load compiled object modules
on ia64, and hence should use a slightly different method for building
and saving images on top of it than is customary on i386.  I can
provide details on request.  amd64 on the other hand is just like x86
in this regard.  Both are fully 64bit lisp systems.

> Also, does GCL support multiprocessors?
> 

GCL is not currently multi-threaded, but does have a very good C
interface, making MPI implementations and the like quite easy.  Check
out pargcl, an interface for using external MPI libraries to
communicate between gcl images across cluster nodes via tcp, or
between processors on the same machine using shared memory.  There is
also a pvm interface at ftp://ftp.ma.utexas.edu/gcl.  Lastly, it is
quite simple to write your own function calling 'fork()' and
communicating to the child via pipes via the gcl utility (clines
"...."), which has the same effect between lisp and C as the inlined
assembler directive __asm__ does between C and asm.

Take care,

> 
> -Rob
> 
> -----
> Rob Warnock                   <address@hidden>
> 627 26th Avenue                       <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
> San Mateo, CA 94403           (650)572-2607
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
==========================================================================
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]