is maxima suitable for multiprocessor computations?

I don't know if that reference points it out, but the idea for mapreduce was
taken from Lisp.
 RJF

> -----Original Message-----
> From: maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu 
> [mailto:maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Dodier
> Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 8:07 AM
> To: Stavros Macrakis
> Cc: maxima at math.utexas.edu
> Subject: Re: [Maxima] is maxima suitable for multiprocessor 
> computations?
> 
> On 11/14/07, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Along these lines, I came across this blurb about MapReduce which
> appears to be a system for automatically parallelizing programs.
> http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
> If Google is on the bandwagon, it must be a good idea, right??
> 
> These days a big data set is often stuff someone pulled off the web.
> Maxima is not usually applied to big piles of textual data,
> but I see no reason to rule it out; text processing is just a variety
> of symbolic computation anyway.
> 
> FWIW
> 
> Robert
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