🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Nov24.221715.11245@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> lubo@doe.utoronto.ca writes:
>We are currently running 1108's, and are considering acquiring SUNs
>for the primary purpose of extending the life of our existing lisp
>programs.  A secondary consideration is improving the performance 
>running Xerox Lisp.

Where I used to work, Centre for Speech Technology Research here
at Univ Edinburgh, we have used xerox machines (1108. 1109 and 1186) 
for years but recently decided to move towards suns.

I evaluated a number of different lisp systems for the sun including
Sun Medley, Allegro Common Lisp, and Harlequin LispWorks.

Here are some comments I wrote on Sun Medley 1.1:

This was installed on a Sun4/110 with 8Megabyte of memory.  This
product runs as a (very) large unix process, which effectively takes
over the whole machine.  It implements a full emulator for xerox
sysouts.  This in itself is very impressive.

After basic installation, I copied the our local sysout from the file
server and ran that as the default sysout on the Sun4.  The effect for
almost all purposes is that the Sun4 becomes an 1186. The keyboard and
mouse are a different shape but everything is the same, bugs and all.
I tried running code generated on my own 1186 to get timings.  The
result was that for small and medium sized tasks, the timings were the
same.  However if I copy the common lisp code and compile and run it
on kcl on the Sun (as a unix machine) it runs about 7 times faster.
Recompiling the code on the Sun running medley made no difference to
to speed.

When very large processes are run on the Sun4 under medley it begins
to show its value.  For processes that use lots of space and are
running for a long time (more than 12 hours), the Sun4 was almost twice
the speed of the 1186.  This is because the Sun4 had 8M of memory (the
1186 has 3.7M).  Also it should be added that this task would not run
in kcl on the Sun4 (unix) in reasonable time because the Sun's paging
algorithm is not tuned to lisp.  However if the money spent on the
Medley system was spent on more memory for the Sun you would end up
with a machine 7 times faster than the 1186.

Medley on a Sun seemed to take away all the advantages of moving to
Suns.  I did try to see if you could run a window manager and a medley
sysout at the same time.  This did not seem possible.  You can stop the
medley system and restart it, running a window manager in between, but
you have to exit the window manger to return to medley as there is no
way to stop a window manager and all its children (gracefully).

Thus my conclusions are, yes this offers a full 1186 programming
environment on a Sun4 (it should be faster on a Sun4/330).  The 1186
programming environment is still the best I have seen anywhere.  But
it effectively excludes the use of many of the UNIX facilities we
want. (Converting our code to general common lisp was a feasible thing
to do for us, so other common lisp environments were possible
alternatives to medley on a sun)

I have heard that it does indeed run faster on the newer sparcstations
but not as fast as running a Common Lisp under Unix.  Note that 1109's
are faster than 1186 (I think) but I can't remember about 1108's).  


Now to answer your questions more specifically:


>        - Were there any compatibility problems from 1108
>                Lyric to Sun Medley?
>                Should it work just out of the box?
I was impressed, I installed it and once I got our standard sysout all
worked, no recompiling necessary.  CHAT was a little different and anything
that used the TCP/IP stuff but basic Common Lisp/ Interlisp stuff seemed
ok.  We sort of skipped Lyric, So I can't really comment on the Lyric
to Sun medley compatability, only Medley to Sun Medley.

>        - We are using Xerox Character Code Standard fonts
>                outside of CS0.  Are all fonts supported
>                in the same way under Medley Sun?
I don't really know about this, but as far I understand it the sun medley
stuff makes the sun into an 1186 all stuff as before, though the screen 
quality is better on the sun (see notes above)

>        - How much memory is "enough" to get a reasonable
>                improvement in performance over the 1108's?

I tested it on an 8M machine, the more the better I think, but the
performance was better (though not much) than an 1186.  I think that
sun medley requires a little less memory than the other common lisp
environments (e.g. Allegro and Lispworks) as medley does its memory
management better though at a price of being slower for simple code
(i.e. code not involving a lot of paging).

>        - Which models do you (don't you) recommend?
>               3/60, 3/80, ... , Sparcstation1, ...
They do say it runs on sun3s though I am little wary of this.  I have only
heard about it running on sun4/110s and sparcstations.  I had heard 
(from a salesman) that on a sun3 (not sure if thats a 3/80 or 3/60) it
runs at the about the same speed too. (I wonder what they are doing with all
those extra mips on a sun4).

Note that these are *my* experiences for running *my* code (a large
and complex speech recogniser system).  It may be completely different
for your system.  I suggest you try and get an evaluation copy and
play with it.  Here in the UK, they (AI Limited) seemed quite good
about that.

Alan

Alan W Black                          80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, UK
Dept of Artificial Intelligence       tel: (+44) -31 225 7774 x236
University of Edinburgh               email: awb@ed.ac.uk