Characterization of VAX Macsyma

ABSTRACT

The algebraic manipulation system Macsyma [Grou77, Fate80] has been running for over a year on Digital Equipment Corp. VAX-11 large-address-space medium-scale computers [Stre78]. In order to run Macsyma in this environment, a Lisp system for the VAX, FRANZ LISP[Fode50], was constructed at Berkeley. The goal of running Macsyma provided direction and motivation and is partially responsible for the rapid development of the Lisp system. Because Lisp is a high level language there are many decisions to be made about the internal framework of the system. Efforts to increase efficiency require that we be able to characterize the demands of a large, compiled, Lisp system. Fortunately, the VAX/UNIX operating system provides useful tools for determining such characteristics. This paper presents some of our data and related analysis.

REFERENCES

• 1: W. C. Alexander and D. B. Wortman, "Static and Dynamic characteristics of XPL Programs," Computer8(11) pp. 41-46 (November 1975).
• 2: Henry G. Baker, "A Note of the Optimal Allocation of Spaces in Maclisp," MIT AI Working paper 142 (March 1977).
• 3: Bruce W. Char, "On Stieltjes' Continued Fraction for the Gamma Function." Mathematics of Computation34(150) pp. 547-551 (April 1980).
• 4: Douglas W. Clark , C. Cordell Green, An empirical study of list structure in Lisp, Communications of the ACM, v.20 n.2, p.78-87, Feb. 1977 [doi>10.1145/359423.359427]
• 5: Richard J. Fateman, Addendum to the Macsyma Reference Manual for the VAX. 1980.
• 6: J. P. Fitch and A. C. Norman, "Implementing LISP in a High-Level Language," Software-Practice and Experience 7 pp. 713-725 (1977).
• 7: John K. Foderaro and Keith L. Sklower, The Franz Lisp Manual. 1980.
• 8: C. C. Foster, R. H. Gonter, and E. M. Riseman, "Measures of Op-Code Utilization," IEEE Transactions on Computers, pp. 582-584 (May 1971).
• 9: Mathlab Group, Macsyma Reference Manual, Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT (1977).
• 10: Robert R. Henry, Techniques to Measure Static and Dynamic Operator and Operand Statistics on the VAX. 1980.
• 11: W. N. Joy, "Virtualizing a Swap-Based system to do Paging in an Architecture lacking Page-Referenced Bits," UCB CS Internal memorandum (1981).
• 12: Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1998
• 13: Thomas A. Standish, Data Structure Techniques, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1980
• 14: Guy L. Steele, "Data Representations in PDP-10 Maclisp," Proceedings of the 1977 MACSYMA Users' Conference, pp. 203-214 (July 1977).
• 15: William D. Strecker, "VAX-11/780: A Virtual Address Extension to the DEC PDP-11 Family," Proc NCC, pp. 987-980 (June 1978).

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.1 SYMBOLIC AND ALGEBRAIC MANIPULATION
      I.1.3 Languages and Systems

          Nouns: MACSYMA

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.0 General

          Nouns: VAX/VMS
      D.4.8 Performance

General Terms:
Algorithms, Languages, Management, Performance, Theory