Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!pyramid!decwrl!spar!malcolm
From: malcolm@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Malcolm Slaney)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Numerical Programming in Common Lisp
Message-ID: <371@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: 9 Dec 87 21:55:03 GMT
References: <1254@vaxb.calgary.UUCP> <477@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Reply-To: malcolm@spar.UUCP (Malcolm Slaney)
Organization: SPAR - Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Lines: 27
Summary: Yes, we have an extensive signal processing library

In article <477@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> jwb@CIVE.RI.CMU.EDU (John Baugh) writes:
>Anyone using Common Lisp for numerical programming?  

Yes, we (the speech understanding group at Schlumberger) are doing all of our 
number crunching in Common Lisp.  We have a very extensive environment written
in Common Lisp that is currently running on Symbolics, Suns (both Franz
and Lucid) and Xerox D machines.

As far as performance goes......I have seen some floating point benchmarks
that show Lucid Lisp (on a Sun-3/160) doing FFT's within 20% of the speed
of a Symbolics machine or the same algorithm written in C (on the 160.)  
Unfortunately, you have to put declarations in the right spot and if you
use displaced arrays you might have problems.  As it stands now our package
is running about 100 times slower on a Sun than it does on a Symbolics
machine.   Lucid (and I assume Franz) and SPAR are working on this.

For more information on this package drop me a note or see:
	Kopec, Gary, "The Signal Representation Language SRL", IEEE
	Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Vol ASSP-33,
	August 1985.

	Kopec, Gary, "The Integrated Signal Processing System  ISP", IEEE
	Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Vol ASSP-32,
	August 1984.

Cheers.

								Malcolm