Many LISP programmers have felt the need for greater CPU power.  Yet not so
many have ventured into parallel programming due to the steep learning curve
and the unfamiliar programming environment entailed by such an effort.  In an
attempt to remedy that situation, the parallel library MPI has been integrated
into GCL (GNU Common LISP).  This implementation is an example that extends
bindings of MPI to interactive languages.  (MPI already has bindings to the
compiled languages C and FORTRAN.)  Further, this binding to an interactive
language retains the interactive environment during execution.

In addition to MPI, this distribution implements a higher level library
based on the TOP-C (Task Oriented Parallel C/C++) model.

This distribution has been variously called STAR/MPI, GCL/MPI and now ParGCL.
ParGCL represents a blueprint for binding MPI to other interactive languages
besides GCL.

For further reading on this and a family of related systems employing the same
abstraction, see:

G.~Cooperman, ``STAR/MPI:  Binding a Parallel Library to
	Interactive Symbolic Algebra Systems'',
	{\sl Proc. of International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic
	Computation (ISSAC '95)}, ACM Press, pp.~126--132.

G.~Cooperman, ``GAP/MPI: Facilitating Parallelism'',
	{\sl Proceedings of DIMACS Workshop on Groups
	and Computation}, 1995, to appear in {\sl DIMACS Series in
	Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science}, 1996.

G.~Cooperman, ``TOP-C:  A Task-Oriented Parallel C Interface'',
	{\sl $5^{\hbox{th}}$ International Symposium on High Performance
	Distributed Computing} (HPDC-5), IEEE Press, 1996, pp.~141--150.

An example of using the TOP-C model to parallelize Geant4,
a 1,000,000 line C++ program, is provided below.  Geant4 was developed
jointly by CERN and many national laboratories for high energy physics,
with over 100 contributors.

G.~Cooperman, H.~Casanova, J.~Hayes and T.~Witzel,
	``Using {TOP-C} and {AMPIC} to Port Large Parallel Applications
                 to the Computational Grid'',
        {\sl Proc. of 2$^{nd}$ IEEE/ACM International Symposium
                on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid~2002)},
	H.~Bal, A.~Reinefeld, and P.~Lohr (eds.), IEEE Press,
	2002, to appear.
