  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.
