Extreme-Scale Scripting: Opportunities for Large Task-Parallel Applications on Petascale Computers

Parallel scripting is a loosely-coupled programming model in which applications are composed of highly parallel scripts of program invocations that process and exchange data via files. The authors characterize here the applications that can benefit from parallel scripting on petascale-class machines, describe the mechanisms that make this feasible on such systems, and present results achieved with parallel scripts on currently available petascale computers.