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This year at SuperComputing (SC07), the spinoff company commercializing Prof. John Gilbert’s group’s work, Interactive Supercomputing, won the HPC Challenge for productivity. The goal of the competition is to focus the HPC community’s attention on developing a broad set of HPC hardware and HPC software capabilities that are necessary to productively use HPC systems. The winning entry was done in the Python language, extended to a parallel environment with Star-P, and won in the category of “Most Productivity” – based 50% on performance, and 50% on code elegance, clarity, and size.

The basic premise of the model is to maintain compatibility in syntax with serial codes written using the NumPy Python module. In most cases, the user must not be burdened with having to think “in parallel”, keep track of distributions, or worry about which portions of the code runs in serial and which in parallel. This allows users with a large existing serial application to port it to run in parallel with the least amount of effort. More information is available from Interactive Supercomputing