Session

DescriptionPython has become one of the predominant programming languages among scientists due to its simplicity and a very solid ecosystem of scientific libraries for data handling, computing and visualization. As Python keeps gaining popularity, more and more efforts aim to move it from just prototyping and workflow management, to also run production applications on large HPC systems. This minisymposium gathers people working on domain specific Python frameworks for HPC applications and systems, so as to start a conversation on the possibilities of Python as an effective language for high quality HPC applications. We wish this minisymposium to be a starting point to reason about code maintainability and scalability (code size/productivity/debuggability/profiling), deployment models on HPC systems, optimization opportunities, programing models, but also to highlight the opportunities that the Python ecosystem could offer for the next generation of parallel systems and applications, like interactive scientific applications. The talks will present different on-going efforts from several authors to scale actual scientific frameworks to large HPC systems, using different techniques, such as handling of multi-processes and threads and code generation. This will allow us to assess advantages and disadvantages of the different solutions and have a better understanding of the challenges ahead.