Speed freak needs help

[UK0392@AppleLink.Apple.COM (EHN & DIJ Oakley,GB,IDV)]

Friends,
 
I hate to say this, but we are now running into a speed problem with MCL and a
Quadra 950.  It is of our own making, as I will explain, but I am urgently
seeking a means of running pretty standard Common Lisp at 10-20 times greater
speed than MCL 2.0 on a Quadra 950 36/400!  Pretty GUIs are immaterial, and not
used - it is raw Lisp power that I seek (and we do accept that this will cost).
[Having said that, this does not mark a departure from MCL for 99% of our work,
and I am delighted to see that MCL is starting to get the recognition that it
deserves (congrats, MCL team!).]
 
The reason is that we are starting to use John Koza's incredible Genetic
Programming (mail me if you have not heard of this, and I will send you a list
of refs. etc.) to optimise stack filters and other things which require
thousands of iterations of thousands of iterations of thousands of iterations.
Currently, one decent run takes over week on a Quadra 950, even after some
serious tuning of code.  We are committed to using Lisp, and other languages
need not apply.
 
One option that I am thinking of is using a farm of Quadras, but it would be
much neater if we could simply move our code onto another platform.
 
John Koza extols TI Explorers, but after finally tracking down someone who
claims to have a small number of new Explorer systems, I am not sure whether we
would see anything like the necessary acceleration, and the systems are not
cheap.  Suggestions as to whether an Explorer might suffice would be welcome
(and rough estimates on configuration would be even neater - given that the
code runs OK in 6 meg with MCL, but is clearly doing a lot of GC then).
 
Happy Christmas!
Howard.
Howard Oakley,                      * Howard@quercus.demon.co.uk
EHN & DIJ Oakley, Brooklands Lodge, * AppleLink UK0392
Park View Close, Wroxall, Ventnor,  * CompuServe 70734,120
Isle of Wight UK PO38 3EQ           * Tel +44 983 853605, fax 853253