ParFORM: recent development

FORM [1] is a program for symbolic manipulation of algebraic expressions specialized to handle very large expressions of millions of terms in an efficient and reliable way. That is why it is widely used in Quantum Field Theory, where the calculation of the order of several hundred (sometimes thousands) of Feynman diagrams is required. In context with this goal an improvement in computing efficiency is very important. Parallelization is one of the most efficient way to increase performance. So the idea to parallelize FORM is quite natural. ParFORM is the parallel version of FORM developed in Karlsruhe since 1998 [2]. At present, a number of real physical applications exist which were performed with the help of ParFORM [3]. There are some internal mechanisms of FORM that makes FORM very well suited for parallelization [2,4]. The concept of parallelization is indicated in Fig. 1: Distribute the input terms among available processors, let each of them perform local operations on its input terms, generate and sort the arising output terms. At the end of a module the sorted streams of terms from all processors have to be merged to one final output stream again. A master process initializes the distribution of