Parallel symbolic processing-can it be done?

My principle answer is: yes, but it depends. Parallelization of symbolic applications is possible, but only for certain classes of applications. Distributed memory may prevent parallelization in some cases where the relation of computation and communication overhead becomes too high, but also may be an advantage when applications require much garbage collection, which can then be done in a distributed way. There are also some applications which have a higher degree of parallelism than can be supported by shared memory, and so are candidates for profiting by massively parallel architectures