[Openmcl-devel] Using Lisp and many cores

[Robert Boyer]

Matt Kaufmann (kaufmann at cs.utexas.edu) makes the
normally hours-long ACL2 regression run with
parallelism, effectively using as many as 8 cores
simultaneously on a 12 core machine, an X86 Gnu-Linux
running CCL.  I suspect Matt can do the same thing on
other cpu/lisp platforms.

Matt's technique is to use the Gnu/Linux 'make' -j
flag/option.

The hundreds of Lisps jobs that are fired up read and
write files written by one another, all organized in
the usual 'make' style.

Some might claim that this is not Lisp, or not
parallelism, or cheating, or ...  Maybe, but I now
happily and very regularly use it, to the point that it
has become a necessity rather than a novelty.

Bob