The present paper is the first of a series of papers reporting on the
parallelization of the symbolic manipulation program FORM on different
parallel architectures. Part I deals with workstation clusters using
dedicated network hardware and the messages passing libraries (MPI and
PVM). After a short introduction to the sequential version of FORM a
detailed analysis of the different platforms used is given and the
structure of the parallel version of FORM is explained. The forthcoming
part II will describe the parallelization of FORM on SMP (symmetrical
multi-processing) architectures.
