This book contains papers presented at a workshop on the use
of parallel techniques in symbolic and algebraic computation
held at Cornell University in May 1990. The eight papers in
the book fall into three groups.
The first three papers discuss particular programming
substrates for parallel symbolic computation, especially for
distributed memory machines. The next three papers discuss
novel ways of computing with elements of finite fields and
with algebraic numbers. The finite field technique is
especially interesting since it uses the Connection Machine,
a SIMD machine, to achievesurprising amounts of
parallelism. One of the parallel computing substrates is
also used to implement a real root isolation technique.
One of the crucial algorithms in modern algebraic
computation is computing the standard, or Gr|bner, basis of
an ideal. The final two papers discuss two different
approaches to speeding their computation. One uses vector
processing on the Cray and achieves significant speed-ups.
The other uses a distributed memory multiprocessor and
effectively explores the trade-offs involved with different
interconnect topologies of the multiprocessors.