Swift/T REPL: An Interactive Shell for a Parallel Scripting Language

With the rapid technological advances in high-performance computing, access to parallel computing resources is becoming more prevalent in the scientific community. Scientific computation has been proven to be an invaluable tool for tackling challenges faced by science, but writing massivelyparallel software for scientific applications remains difficult and requires years of training and practice, making the idea of writing one’s own software a painful option for novices. Recently, software frameworks aimed at easing the development process, such as Swift/T, have been successfully used to allow scientists to write software in the form of high-level scripts that automatically parallelize and scale across huge high-performance computers. However, the learning curve can be further flattened by incorporating interactivity into Swift/T, specifically using a read-eval-print-loop (REPL) mode. This project investigates the validity and usefulness of adding an interactive REPL to Swift/T, as well as surveying other popular scientific computing environments and interfacing with them.