Robert H. Halstead
ABSTRACT
Multilisp is an extension of Lisp (more specifically, of the Lisp dialect Scheme [15]) with additional operators and additional semantics to deal with parallel execution. It is being implemented on the 32-processor Concert multiprocessor. The current implementation is complete enough to run the Multilisp compiler itself, and has been run on Concert prototypes including up to four processors. Novel techniques are used for task scheduling and garbage collection. The task scheduler helps control excessive resource utilization by means of an unfair scheduling policy: the garbage collector uses a multiprocessor algorithm modeled after the incremental garbage collector of Baker [2]. A companion paper [9] discusses language design issues relating to Multilisp.
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Index Terms
- Implementation of multilisp: Lisp on a multiprocessor
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