is maxima suitable for multiprocessor computations?

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying that parallelism couldn't be used in
symbolic calculation, just that there is no straightforward way to take
advantage of multiple processors in Maxima as it is currently built.  I
would guess, for example, that polynomial factorization could be rewritten
to take advantage of multiple processors, but I don't think it would be
easy, partly because the Lisp code would have to be refactored, partly
because of the system issues (is there any free Lisp that supports
multiprocessing? if not, there's the messy matter of interprocess
communication).

I suppose some user calculations (numerical or not) would be an exception --
when you are calculating f(X) for multiple values of X, you could simply
split up the value space and delegate to multiple instances of Maxima, which
the OS would take care of allocating to multiple processors.

             -s