Compyle: a Python package for parallel computing

Abstract

Compyle allows users to execute a restricted subset of Python on a variety of HPC platforms. It is an embedded domain-specific language (eDSL) for parallel computing. It currently supports multi-core execution using Cython, and OpenCL and CUDA for GPU devices. Users write code in a restricted subset of Python that is automatically transpiled to high-performance Cython or C. Compyle also provides a few very general purpose and useful parallel algorithms that allow users to write code once and have them run on a variety of HPC platforms.In this article, we show how to implement a simple two-dimensional molecular dynamics (MD) simulation package in pure Python using Compyle. The result is a fully parallel program that is relatively easy to implement and solves a non-trivial problem. The code transparently executes on multi-core CPUs and GPGPUs allowing simulations with millions of particles. A 3D MD code is also provided and compares very favorably with a well known, open source, molecular dynamics package.