Abstract
The development of Mul-T has been valuable in several ways. First, Mul-T is a complete, working parallel Lisp system, publicly available to interested users. Second, its single-processor performance is competitive with that of “production quality” sequential Lisp implementations, and therefore a parallel program running under Mul-T can show absolute speedups over the best sequential implementation of the same algorithm. This is attractive to application users whose primary interest is raw speed rather than the abstract gratification of having demonstrated speedup via a time-consuming simulation. Finally, implementing Mul-T has allowed us to experiment with and evaluate implementation strategies such as inlining. The Mul-T experience has also allowed us to probe the limits of implementing futures on stock multiprocessors, and has suggested (for example) that hardware assistance for tag management may be a more significant benefit in a machine for parallel Lisp (where it can eliminate the 65% overhead of implicit touches) than it has ever proven to be in machines for sequential Lisps.
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Kranz, D.A., Halstead, R.H., Mohr, E. (1990). Mul-T: A high-performance parallel lisp. In: Ito, T., Halstead, R.H. (eds) Parallel Lisp: Languages and Systems. PSC 1989. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 441. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024163
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024163
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