Extensible Message Passing Application Development and Debugging with Python

We describe how we have parallelized Python, an interpreted object oriented scripting language, and used it to build an extensible message-passing molecular dynamics application for the CM-5, Cray T3D, and Sun multiprocessor servers running MPI. This allows us to interact with large-scale message-passing applications, rapidly prototype new features, and perform application specific debugging. It is even possible to write message passing programs in Python itself. We describe some of the tools we have developed to extend Python and results of this approach.