Visual High Performance Computing in Python
Lack of abstraction remained biggest bottleneck for High-Performance Computing(HPCs), as Daniel Reed points
To date, attempts to develop higher level programming abstractions, tools and environments for high-performance computing have largely failed. There are many reasons for this failure, but I believe many are rooted in our excessive focus on hardware performance measures.
What is needed is a smooth visual workflow which can simplify both the programming task and the remote execution management. Recently I started playing with VISION/HPC which seems to be an elegant solution to the abstraction problem. VISION is a
python-based, drag and-drop visual-programming environment that reduces sophisticated programming tasks to drawing interactive flowcharts encapsulating the underlying programming complexity. Such flowcharts are built by dropping and connecting computational boxes on a flowchart instead of writing code. This is an important issue for productivity since productivity is dominated by the workflow of the user (e.g., time spent running versus time spent programming). As a python-based package, it is possible to embed parallel computing features from iPython into VISION to enable both visual programming as well as parallel execution on remote high performance computers.
VISION is developed at Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. Nodes for all of the major scientific Python packages including SciPy, numpy, and matplotlib are already avilable for use, apart from that creating a custom node is quite flexible. Check out these cool well documented video toturials to learn more about visual computing in Python.
7 Responses to “Visual High Performance Computing in Python”
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Hello OzFebruary 11, 2012 at 5:56 pm -
Good move by Elsevier, but company need more than PR efforts to save it's ground. Why so afraid accepting the new reality, open is future.February 11, 2012 at 3:01 am
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Dear Entrepreneur, CXO of unknown start-up with uncertain business model, be grounded and humble. cheersFebruary 10, 2012 at 2:53 am
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Actually, VISION is a product of the Scripps Research Institute (Dr. Michel Sanner et. al.) and VISION/HPC is a product of the DoD High-Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP, Dr. Jose Unpingco et. al.). VISION/HPC is the combination of VISION and IPython.