Much of what you say is wrong.
Much of maxima is written in a side-effect-free functional programming style
which is inherently capable of being run in parallel.
There is a history of parallel lisps that would automatically run such
programs in parallel, though making best use of parallel hardware generally
requires some recognition of such factors as the cost of sharing memory, the
cost of starting or stopping another process, how many processors, etc.
Look up qlambda and multilisp and L* (L star) on Thinking Machines
There are multiprocessing lisps today, as well, but distributed memory?
maybe not unless you count MPI.
Mathematica is written partly in Mathematica but largely in a dialect of C
that encourages use of objects and better control of memory. If you believe
their sales literature, Mathematica takes advantage of parallelism. Read
their literature, and try timing their programs, and
maybe tell us what you learned.
The simplest route to parallelism is most likely by converting algorithms to
kernels of computation that other people have carefully designed for
parallel execution.
see
http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Main_Page
are there computer-algebra-system unique kernels? Look at parallel grobner
basis computations; many papers (including some by my students); I think
limited success, though .
RJF
_____
From: maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu [mailto:maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu]
On Behalf Of ahmet alper parker
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 9:54 AM
To: maxima at math.utexas.edu
Subject: distributed computing
Dear All,
As I have asked previously, maxima is written in a serial manner and the
only way to parallelize it is using parallel compiling lisps. Am I wrong?
Can you give me such lisp implementations that can at least parallelize some
parts of maxima (I am talking about distributed memory, not multithreading)?
I have searched but cannot find a suitable distro. Also do any of you know
in which language does mathematica written? How they have parallelized their
code?
Best Regards
Ahmet Alper Parker