Symbolic computing, Lisp languages, and parallel computing

Abstract

In this paper we review symbolic parallel programming issues. We start describing the peculiarities of symbolic programming. Next, we review the standard parallel programming framework for the imperative-like languages. Also the autoscheduling environment, proposed by Polychronopoulos (1990), is introduced. The current extensions for symbolic parallel programming are described. The problem how to efficiently manage the parallelism in LISP is addressed, and the Hierarchical Task Graph, an intermediate program representation in which the parallelism is expressed by the task hierarchy, and the associated run-time model are also described. The extensions necessary to manage the parallelism at run-time in a multiprogramming environment are described.<>