A Para-Functional Programming Interface for a Parallel Computer Algebra Package

We describe the application of pD, a small para-functional language that we developed as a high-level programming interface for the parallel computer algebra package PACLIB. pD provides several facilities to express parallel algorithms in a flexible way on different levels of abstraction. The compiler translates a pD module into statically typed parallel C code with explicit task creation and synchronization constructs. This target code can be linked with the PACLIB kernel, the multi-processor runtime system of the computer algebra library SACLIB. The parallelization of several computer algebra algorithms on a shared memory multi-processor demonstrates the elegance and efficiency of this approach.