== Interactive Parallel Computing using Python and IPython ==

[[http://txcorp.com|Brian Granger - Tech X Corp.]]

Interactive computing environments, such as Matlab, IDL and
Mathematica are popular among researchers because their
interactive nature is well matched to the exploratory nature of
research.  However, these systems have one critical weakness:
they are not designed to take advantage of parallel computing
hardware such as multi-core CPUs, clusters and supercomputers.
Thus, researchers usually turn to non-interactive compiled
languages, such as C/C++/Fortran when parallelism is needed.

In this talk I will describe recent work on the IPython project
to implement a software architecture that allows parallel
applications to be developed, debugged, tested, executed and
monitored in a fully interactive manner using the Python
programming language.  This system is fully functional and allows
many types of parallelism to be expressed, including message
passing (using MPI), task farming, shared memory, and custom user
defined approaches.  I will describe the architecture, provide an
overview of its basic usage and then provide more sophisticated
examples of how it can be used in the development of new parallel
algorithms.  Because IPython is one of the components of the SAGE
system, I will also discuss how IPython's parallel computing
capabilities can be used in that context.