Symbolic computation interaction in SCIEnce

The project "SCIEnce - Symbolic Computation Infrastructure for Europe" (http://www.symbolic-computation.org/) is an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative funded by the EU FP6 Programme. The aim of the project it to to allow a unified communication between different computer algebra systems (CASes) or different instances of one CAS. This may involve one or more computers, clusters, and even grids. To determine the rules of such communication, we developed SCSCP - Symbolic Computation Software Composability protocol (http://www.symbolic-computation.org/scscp). It specifies a remote procedure call framework, in which not only mathematical objects, but also all messages (procedure calls and returns of results of successful computation or error messages) are encoded in the OpenMath format (http://www.openmath.org/) using OpenMath content dictionaries scscp1 (http://www.win.tue.nl/SCIEnce/cds/scscp1.html) and scscp2 (http://www.win.tue.nl/SCIEnce/cds/scscp2.html). In my talk I will present the GAP package SCSCP (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~alexk/scscp.htm) which implements SCSCP in GAP. Using this package, the GAP system can communicate locally or remotely with any other OpenMath-enabled SCSCP-compliant application which may be not only another computer algebra system but also another instance of the GAP system or even, for example, an external application via Java SCSCP API (http://java.symcomp.org/) or C/C++ SCSCP API (http://www.imcce.fr/Equipes/ASD/trip/scscp/). Such communication will go into seamless manner for the GAP user, since all conversions from GAP to OpenMath and vice versa are performed in the background. I will also demonstrate examples of parallel computations using this package.