[Axiom-developer] Embedding Axiom

[Tim Daly]

Another trend that is important is the development of parallelism.
Berkeley has a group dedicated to this it seems[1]. Assuming that
today's uniprocessor power is the peak speed for the future we
need to architect the system to take advantage of parallelism.

My view of the natural embedding of parallelism in Axiom is
tightly coupled to provisos. The proviso mechanism holds, manages,
and carries the assumptions that each branch of a computation will
use to constrain the answer. Thus if you have
  f(x) | x > 0
  f(x) | x = 0
  f(x) | x < 0
then you have the ability to perform all three computations in
parallel. I am assuming functional programming and immutable
data structures. These three computations can be forked into their
own images and then the results can be joined. This is a "natural"
parallelism for mathematics computation.

Thus some thought needs to be given to re-architecting the system
to support provisos in a natural way.

Tim

[1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.pdf