Re: Speed freak needs help

[lynch@ils.nwu.edu]

Maybe this is an insane question, but what sort of speed does Koza get with
the Explorer?
Is he getting 10-20 times yours?
Or has he only used small test cases?

----------Quoted message follows:

>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).
-- 
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-- "TANSTAAFL" Rich lynch@ils.nwu.edu