An Experimental LISP Machine
Lun Wang · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1987
This paper presents a multi-microprocessor LISP machine whose goal is to exploit the inherent parallelism in the LISP programs fully. The base architecture is a MIMD architecture based on a hybrid model for combinating data driven, demand driven and VoN Neumann process schemes. The basic evaluation strategy is data driven. Lazy evaluation mechanism is introduced to avoid unnecessary and unsafe computations. An experimental system with the four processor elements has been built in HIT, China. The system consists of a Z80 microcomputer and three TP8O1s interconnected through three buses. Each processor evaluates a part of programs asynchronously. The shared memory is divided into two parts: list cell area and enviroment area, each of which has the indepen-dent common bus to avoid the bus bottleneck.