The first public beta release of GAP 4[6] was made on July 18 1997. Since then the system has been cited in over 2400 publications, and its distribution now includes over 130 contributed extension pack- ages. This tutorial will review the special features of computational abstract algebra and how they are reflected in the system design; some areas of current algorithmic development, and some recent achievements.

In order to keep up with the demand for solutions to problems with ever-increasing data sets, both academia and industry have embraced commodity computer clusters with locally attached disks or SANs as an inexpensive alternative to supercomputers. With the advent of tools for parallel disks programming, such as MapReduce, STXXL and Roomy --- that allow the developer to focus on higher-level algorithms --- the programmer productivity for memory-intensive programs has increased many-fold. However, such parallel tools were primarily targeted at iterative programs.

We describe how to count the cases that arise in a family of visualization techniques, including Marching Cubes, Sweeping Simplices, Contour Meshing, Interval Volumes, and Separating Surfaces. Counting the cases is the first step toward developing a generic visualization algorithm to produce substitopes (geometric substitutions of polytopes). We demonstrate the method using "GAP," a software system for computational group theory. The case-counts are organized into a table that provides a taxonomy of members of the family; numbers in the table are derived from actual lists of cases, which are computed by our methods. The calculations confirm previously reported case-counts for four dimensions that are too large to check by hand and predict the number of cases that will arise in substitope algorithms that have not yet been invented. We show how Pólya theory produces a closed-form upper bound on the case counts.

We describe how to count the cases that arise in a family of visualization techniques, including marching cubes, sweeping simplices, contour meshing, interval volumes, and separating surfaces. Counting the cases is the first step toward developing a generic visualization algorithm to produce substitopes (geometric substitution of polytopes). We demonstrate the method using a software system ("GAP") for computational group theory. The case-counts are organized into a table that provides taxonomy of members of the family; numbers in the table are derived from actual lists of cases, which are computed by our methods. The calculation confirms previously reported case-counts for large dimensions that are too large to check by hand, and predicts the number of cases that will arise in algorithms that have not yet been invented.