Re2 MCL is speedy

[Howard@quercus.demon.co.uk]

Bill,

>>Depending on the pricing that you can get, a Mac Quadra 950 with MCL 2.0
>>appears to be excellent value (top of the 'bang per buck' league) and said
>>Quadra with 4 x Radius Rocket 33 boards would appear to be a very potent
>>desktop Lisp platform if you can parallelize your code.
>
>  What?  Can this be done?  How does MCL support this?????

Probably.  I will expand:

The Mac - RadiusRocket - RocketShare combination is capable of producing
one CPU box with a number of 68040 CPUs in it.  Thus, a Mac Quadra 950
should take 4 x Radius Rocket 33s to give a total of 5 x 68040 processors
at modest cost.

There is a bit of an 'if' here, in that some folks have reported that MCL
may not work under RocketShare, i.e. that you could only run a single copy
of MCL at a time and on one of the 68040s.  However, it may be that this
results from problems with the Rocket's interleaved RAM mode rather than
any inherent incompatibility, and this can be solved by configuring each
Rocket with unequal amounts of RAM in its two SIMM banks, e.g. 16+4 Mbyte. 
If this is the case, we then effectively have 5 x Quadra 950s in a single
box.

Parallelizing code can of course be a major problem, but in the instance
cited, we are running genetic programming code, which is inherently
parallel and at a reasonably coarse level.  Thus, I will be parallelizing
my code to run on all the processors, using AppleEvents to communicate
between them.

I hope that this helps,
Howard.
Howard Oakley,                      * Howard@quercus.demon.co.uk
EHN & DIJ Oakley, Brooklands Lodge, * AppleLink UK0392
Park View Close, Wroxall, Ventnor,  * CompuServe 70734,120
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