Parallel Lisps

• Butterfly Lisp (BBN)
• Butterfly PSL (Portable Standard Lisp) (University of Utah)
• Connection Machine Lisp (Thinking Machines Corporation)
• Connection Machine *Lisp (StarLisp) (Thinking Machines Corporation)
• Multilisp (M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science)
• Qlisp (Stanford University)
• SPUR Lisp (University of California, Berkeley)
• Symmetric Lisp (M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science)
• UMass Parallel Common Lisp (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Top Level Common Lisp

Bibliography

• [Benjamin Zorn and Tomoyuki Tanaka.] Mary S. Van Deusen, editor. A bibliography on multiprocessor Lisp systems and applications. SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers, Volume 1, Number 6, April-May-June 1988, pages 51–57. ACM Digital Library

Butterfly Lisp (BBN)

"This paper describes the Common Lisp system that BBN is developing for its Butterfly^TM multiprocessor. The BBN Butterfly^TM is a shared memory multiprocessor which may contain up to 256 processor nodes. The system provides a shared heap, parallel garbage collector, and window based I/O system. The future construct is used to specify parallelism." [Steinberg et al. 1986]

The system was derived from C Scheme, written at MIT by members of the Scheme Team.

Papers

• Seth A. Steinberg, Don Allen, Laura Bagnall, and Curtis Scott. The Butterfly^TM Lisp System. In Proceedings of the Fifth AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'86). AAAI Press, pages 730–734. PDF at aaai.org
• Donald C. Allen, Seth A. Steinberg, and Lawrence A. Stabile. Recent Developents in Butterfly^TM Lisp. In Proceedings of the Sixth National conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1 (AAAI'87). AAAI Press, pages 2–6. PDF at aaai.org

Source code

• BBN Butterfly Common Lisp and BBN Butterfly Scheme. Online at CMU AI Repository

Butterfly Portable Standard LISP (University of Utah)

• Mark Swanson, Robert Kessler, and Gary Lindstrom. An implementation of portable standard LISP on the BBN butterfly. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming (LFP '88). ACM, New York, pages 132-142. ACM Digital Library
• See also Portable Standard LISP.

Connection Machine Lisp (Thinking Machines Corporation)

• Guy L. Steele, Jr. and W. Daniel Hillis. Connection Machine Lisp: fine-grained parallel symbolic processing. In Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming (LFP '86). ACM, New York, 1986, pages 279-297. ACM Digital Library PDF at diyhpl.us

Connection Machine *Lisp (StarLisp) (Thinking Machines Corporation)

"*LISP is a language designed to run on the Connection Machine system, Thinking Machines Corporation's data parallel computer. The design and implementation of the language, as well as the creation and revision of this manual, are the result of the efforts of many people at Thinking Machines. *LISP is the result of four years of language development. The original language, URDU, was designed by Cliff Lasser in 1982 when the Connection Machine system was still in its design phase at M.I.T. While the hardware was being built at Thinking Machines, URDU evolved into SIMPL. Based on many users' experiences with SIMPL on the Connection Machine hardware, *LISP emerged.

• Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro were the primary designers and authors of the *LISP language and this manual.
• Other people who contributed to the design were Guy Blelloch, Brewster Kahle, JP Massar, John Rose, and Jim Salem.
• Cliff Lasser and George Robertson implemented the hardware version.
• JP Massar implemented the simulator.
• Janet MacLaren, JP Massar, and Charles Perkins edited and produced this manual.
• Thanks also to Danny Hillis and Guy Steele for their continual support and assistance."

[The Essential *Lisp Manual]

Source code of *Lisp Simulator

• J.P. Massar. Version F19. .zip Online at CMU AI Repository Original announcement on comp.archives
• J.P. Massar. Version F20. Ported to ANSI Common Lisp, September 2001. .zip Online at examples.franz.com via Internet Archive Announcement on comp.lang.lisp

Documentation

• Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro. The Essential *Lisp Manual : Release 1, Revision 3. Technical Report 86.15, Thinking Machines Corporation, April 1986. PDF at omohundro.files.wordpress.com
• Anonymous. *Lisp documentation. Thinking Machines Corporation.
  • Version 5, September 1988. Scans provided by Carl Shapiro.
    • *Lisp Reference Manual. 69 pages. PDF DJVU
    • *Lisp Release Notes. 32 pages. PDF DJVU
    • Supplement to the *Lisp Reference Manual. 192 pages. PDF DJVU
    • *Lisp Compiler Guide. 72 pages. PDF DJVU
    • *Lisp Master Index. 9 pages. Covers Reference Manual, Supplement, and Compiler Guide. PDF DJVU
  • Version 5.1, June 1989.
    • Release notes. PDF at bitsavers.org
  • Version 5.2, October 1989.
    • *Lisp Release Notes, October, 1989. PDF at bitsavers.org
    • *Lisp Dictionary. February 1990. PDF at bitsavers.org
  • Version 6.0, November 1990.
    • *Lisp Release Notes. PDF at bitsavers.org
  • Version 6.1, October 1991.
    • *Lisp Release Notes. PDF at bitsavers.org
    • *Lisp Dictionary. PDF at bitsavers.org
    • Getting Started in *Lisp. June 1991. Text PDF at csail.mit.edu
• In Parallel. Software Bulletin for Programming in *Lisp, 42 pages. Includes issues #4 (April 1989), #3 (March 1989), #2 (February 1989), and #1 (January 1989). Scans provided by Carl Shapiro. PDF DJVU
• Anonymous. *Lisp Timesharing User's Guide. Online at CMU AI Repository

Multilisp (M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science)

• Robert H. Halstead, Jr. Implementation of Multilisp: Lisp on a multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming (LFP '84). ACM, New York, pages 9-17. ACM Digital Library
• R. Halstead and J. Loaiza. Exception handling in Multilisp. Presented at the 1985 Int. Conf. Parallel Processing (St. Charles, Ill., Aug. 1985).
• Robert H. Halstead, Jr. MULTILISP: a language for concurrent symbolic computation. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Volumes 7, Number 4 (October 1985), pages 501-538. ACM Digital Library

Qlisp (Stanford University)

• Richard P. Gabriel and John McCarthy. Queue-based multi-processing LISP. In Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming (LFP '84). ACM, New York,1984, pages 25-44. ACM Digital Library
• Richard P. Gabriel and John McCarthy. QLisp. In Parallel Computation and Computers for Artificial Intelligence, edited by Januss S. Kowalik, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, pages 63-89.
• Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel. Qlisp: experience and new directions. SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 23, Number 9 (January 1988), pages 111-123. ACM Digital Library
• Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel. Preliminary results with the initial implementation of Qlisp. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming (LFP '88). ACM, New York, pages 143-152. ACM Digitial Library
• John McCarthy. Qlisp Final Report. Project "QLISP for Parallel Processors", ARPA Order Number 5826. PDF at dtic.mil
• See also: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Qlisp.html

SPUR Lisp (University of California, Berkeley)

SPUR Lisp was a Common Lisp superset designed to run on the SPUR multiprocessor workstation at the University of California, Berkeley. It was derived from Spice Lisp from Carnegie-Mellon University.

• James R. Larus and Paul N. Hilfinger. Register allocation in the SPUR Lisp compiler. In Proceedings of the 1986 SIGPLAN symposium on Compiler construction (SIGPLAN '86). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pages 255–263. ACM Digital Library
• Benjamin Zorn, Paul Hilfinger, Kinson Ho, and James Larus. SPUR Lisp: Design and implementation. Technical Report UCB/CSD 87/373, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, September 1987. Online at eecs.berkeley.edu
• Benjamin Zorn, Paul Hilfinger, Kinson Ho, James Larus, and Luigi Semenzato. Features for multiprocessing in SPUR Lisp. Technical Report UCB/CSD 88/406, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, March 1988. Online at eecs.berkeley.edu
• Kinson Ho and Paul N. Hilfinger. Implementation of Multiprocessing SPUR Lisp. Technical Report UCB/CSD 88/459, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, November 1988. Online at eecs.berkeley.edu
• Benjamin Zorn, Paul Hilfinger, Kinson Ho, James Larus, and Luigi Semenzato. Lisp extensions for multiprocessing. In Proceedings 22nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kailua-Kona, HA, January 1989. IEEE Xplore
• B. Zorn, K. Ho, J. Larus, L. Semenzato and P. Hilfinger. Multiprocessing extensions in Spur Lisp. IEEE Software, Volume 6, Number 4, pages 41-49, July 1989. IEEE Xplore

Symmetric Lisp (M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science)

• David Gelernter. Symmetric Programming Languages. Technical Report. Yale University (New Haven, July 1984).
• D. Gelernter, S. Jagannathan, and T. London. Parallelism, persistence and meta-cleanliness in the symmetric Lisp interpreter. SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 22, Number 7 (July 1987), pages 274-282. ACM Digitial Library
• D. Gelernter, S. Jagannathan, and T. London. Environments as first class objects. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages (POPL '87). ACM, New York, pages 98-110. ACM Digital Library
• Suresh Jagannathan. A Programming Language Supporting First-Class Parallel Environments. MIT-LCS/TR 434, 1989. Online at researchgate.net

UMass Parallel Common Lisp (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Top Level Common Lisp

"The UMass Parallel Common Lisp (UMass PCL) system (which eventually became the Top Level product) was particularly interesting for several reasons. Not only were some unique decisions made at the time in terms of processes & threads, but the initial implementation was done for the Sequent Symmetry multiprocessor. The Symmetry did not become available as quickly as Sequent had planned, so the initial system was developed and tested on a detailed Symmetry emulator that Kelly Murray developed on the TI Explorer (in Lisp!!). It was a very handy tool, as one could step through processing at the register/memory level and also control (and randomize) low level concurrent activity. The emulator could dump/save state, and the emulator was even used to help debug some OS level code by moving snapshots from the Symmetry to the emulator and watching what happened. So, we actually had the UMass PCL 'running' before the first Symmetry machines were operational!!!" [Dan Corkill, personal communication, September 3, 2010]

• Kelly E. Murray and Daniel D. Corkill. Common Lisp object representation strategies: The UMass Parallel Common Lisp system. Technical Report 88-35, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, April 1988. PDF at umass.edu
• Anonymous. Top Level Common Lisp Reference Manual. Release 1.0.1, Top Level Inc., March 1990. Computer History Museum, Herbert Stoyan Collection on LISP Programming, Accession number 102720325. PDF
• Anonymous. Top Level Common Lisp brochures. Top Level Inc., 1989-1990, 6 pages. Computer History Museum, Herbert Stoyan Collection on LISP Programming, Accession number 102720325. PDF