A PVM-Based Distributed Parallel Symbolic System

The purpose of this work is to provide a parallel programming environment for symbolic applications suited to run on Distributed Memory Parallel Systems (DMPS). This paper describes the implementation of such an environment that is based on Sabot's Paralation model (in particular its LISP implementation, Paralation LISP). In our opinion, the clear distinction between the communication and computation aspects in the Paralation model allows a clearer and easier exploitation of the opportunities of parallelism in symbolic applications. Furthermore, the simple semantics of its parallel constructs seem well suited to run on a community of loosely coupled LISP interpreters. We chose to implement the Paralation model constructs on the top of the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) package because this tool allows one to have a cheap virtual distributed memory parallel machine simply by using some LAN interconnected powerful workstations.