We’re excited to announce that Parsl has joined the NumFOCUS community.
Kyle Chard, Parsl Principal Investigator and Associate Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, expressed his excitement:
“We’re very excited to join the NumFOCUS family. As we work towards establishing a sustainable Parsl community, NumFOCUS is the ideal foundation for Parsl as we have a shared focus on open-source software and scientific computing.”
Parsl is a flexible and scalable open-source parallel programming library that augments Python with simple constructs for encoding parallelism. Through the annotation of Python functions, known as apps, developers can specify opportunities for concurrent execution. These apps, or tasks, can range from pure Python functions to calls to external applications. Parsl dynamically constructs a dependency graph of tasks based on shared input/output data, facilitating efficient concurrent task execution across a variety of computing environments, from laptops to clusters, supercomputers, and clouds.
The impact of Parsl spans across diverse domains, including astrophysics, biology, materials science, and beyond. Notable applications include contributing to the preparation for the analysis of data from theVera C. Rubin Observatory , conducting large-scale genome analyses over data from the Million Veterans Program, and scaling the search for potential COVID-19 therapeutics using computational simulations and screening.
Parsl is represented by a dedicated team including Kyle Chard, Daniel S. Katz, Yadu Babuji, Ben Clifford, and Sophie Bui.
Joining NumFOCUS aligns with Parsl’s commitment to fostering open practices in research and scientific computing. By becoming part of the NumFOCUS community, Parsl aims to share insights on community building, sustainability, and code development while collaborating to accelerate research, discovery, and innovation across various disciplines.
Daniel S. Katz, Parsl Co-Founder, Chief Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Research Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Data Science and the iSchool, emphasized the significance of NumFOCUS’s role:
“Part of Parsl’s sustainability plan has been to model our project on successful projects, and NumFOCUS projects are some of the key ones for us to follow. We also view NumFOCUS as a neutral platform that can help us open up our governance and leadership to those who want to participate.”
Parsl seamlessly integrates with existing NumFOCUS projects, offering a scalable solution to leverage the world’s largest supercomputers. It complements tools like NumPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, and SciPy, enhancing scientific analyses at scale. Moreover, Parsl’s compatibility with Jupyter facilitates the execution of large-scale computing campaigns from within notebooks, further enriching the user experience.
We’re excited to continue to grow our sponsored projects and be able to incorporate so much diverse open scientific computing work into the NumFOCUS family!
