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