An object-oriented platform for distributed highperformance symbolic computation

We describe the distributed object-oriented threads system (DOTS), a programming environment designed to support object-oriented fork/join parallel programming in a heterogeneous distributed environment. A mixed network of Windows NT PCs and UNIX workstations is transformed by DOTS into a homogeneous pool of anonymous compute servers forming together a multicomputer. DOTS is a complete redesign of the distributed threads system (DTS) using the object-oriented paradigm both in its internal implementation and in the programming paradigm it supports. It has been used for the parallelization of applications in the field of computer algebra and in the field of computer graphics. We also give a brief account of applications in the domain of symbolic computation that were developed using DTS. # 1999 IMACS/Elsevie