A Paralation Model Implementation Based on a Concurrent Lisp Interpreter Community

We describe the approach we are pursuing to cope with parallelism in symbolic applications. Our purpose is to build a unified and user friendly parallel symbolic programming environment suited to distributed memory parallel systems (DMPS). This system is based on G.W. Sabot's (1987) Paralation model (in particular its LISP implementation, PARALATION LISP), whose main feature is to clearly differentiate the computational aspect from the communication one. In our opinion this distinction allows a clearer and cleaner exploitation of the opportunities of parallelism in symbolic applications. The simple semantics of the Paralation model parallel constructs seems to us well suited to run on a set of LISP interpreters. We chose to implement the Paralation model extensions on top of the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) package because this tool allows one to easily use a set of LAN interconnected powerful workstations as a general purpose parallel computational resource