[SciPy-user] SciPy, MPI and OpenMP

Lorenzo Isella lorenzo.isella at gmail.com
Mon Aug 18 11:00:13 EDT 2008


Dear All,
I have recently attended a crash course on MPI and OpenMP. The
examples always involved C or Fortran code.
Now, I have a thought: if working on a single processor, I hardly need
to use pure C or pure Fortran. I usually write a Fortran code for the
bottlenecks and compile it with f2py to create a python module I then
import.
Hence two questions:
(1) Can I do something similar with many processors? E.g.: write a
Python code, embed some compiled Fortran code which is supposed to run
on many processors, get the results and come back to Python.

Python--->Fortran on many processors--->back to Python.
(2)Is it also possible to directly parallelize a Python code? I heard
about thread locking in Python.

I did some online research, there seems to be a lot of projects trying
to combine Python and MPI/OpenMP, but many look rather "experimental".
In particular, of course, I would like to hear about SciPy and
parallel computing.
Many thanks

Lorenzo



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