Asynchronous evaluation in Mathematica

Quite often what happens is that you system will run out of memory and start to swap. And swapping will make the system die a slow death. On Linux here is what I do

alias m804='ulimit -v 3800000; /usr/local/bin/math8.0.4/mathematica'

The system then just gives the out of memory message and quits before it goes to swap. Otherwise behaves as usual.

I have next to zero experience with parallel computation in Mathematica, so this might not be the best way, but this is what I managed to dig up from the docs:

Launch a kernel:

In[1]:= LaunchKernels[1]

Out[1]= KernelObject[1, "local"]

Submit some long to finish job:

In[2]:= job = 
 ParallelSubmit[First@SingularValueList[RandomReal[1, {2000, 2000}]]]

Start job:

In[3]:= Parallel`Developer`QueueRun[]

Out[3]= True

Now the job is running in parallel in the background ...

... and we're free to do whatever we want in the main kernel. If I understand your question, this is what you needed. We can run Parallel`Developer`QueueRun[] again to check which parallel evaluations have finished (the display of the evaluation object will dynamically update).

In[4]:= 1 + 1

Out[4]= 2

Wait until the evaluation finishes (if it hasn't yet) and collect the result:

In[5]:= WaitAll[job]

Out[5]= 1000.23