On 7/22/2011 8:53 AM, Paul Cefola wrote:
> Is anyone thinking about the possibilities for applying maxima
> symbolic algebra system in current computer architectures with
> multi-core CPU and multiple processing element GPU?
>
type parallel algebraic computation into Google.
The first page of hits shows you
a list of papers on libraries, and collections
of papers in conference proceedings on this topic.
Parallel computer architectures have been around for several decades.
See
http://pasco2010.imag.fr/
They were not so cheap back in 1988, but the good ideas and not-so-good
ideas could be explored, and people wrote about symbolic computation,
tree-search stuff, interpolation-evaluation stuff, parallel/distributed
hash tables, back then.
I think the best payoff is to translate a symbolic problem into
one of the classic numeric tasks, and use the best available systems
for those. That way when someone invents a better FFT, your own program
runs faster too.
There are also language extensions in various lisps supporting parallel
computation,
but if Maxima is to run on any of a number of lisps, one has to write in
the common subset, making it harder. So far as I know, this has not been
attempted.
You can read a lot about past experience, and some of it is, I think,
relevant. See the PASCO proceedings as a start.
To the extent that symbolic computation uses an unpredictable but
probably large
amount of memory in some linked-list irregular structure, parallel computing
is tough.
RJF