Available in a git repository.
Repository: sawsim
Browsable repository: sawsim
Author: W. Trevor King

Over the past week I've been working up a Python framework for my sawsim simulator, to allow parallel execution on a variety of systems. I think I've got the kinks worked out now, and sawsim (or anything else that can subclass pysawsim.manager.Job can now be transparently executed in parallel using any of

• Python's threading module (the thread manager).
• Python's multiprocessing module (the subproc manager).
• MPI (via mpi4py, the mpi manager).
• PBS (via pbs_python, the pbs manager).

Most of the difficulty is in handling systems where not all of these approaches are viable, (e.g. Python 2.5, so no multiprocessing module, or an SMP host that wants to use subproc without installing mpi4py or pbs_python). I also ran up against Python's issue5155 when I tried to test the subproc manager from within a:

$ nosetests --with-doctest --doctest-tests --processes $N pysawsim

on a Python 2.6.2 system (it was fixed by 2.6.3).

Note that Python's GIL restricts threads to a single core. This means that the thread manager is basically decorative, but I wrote it anyway because it forms the basis of several other managers, and it's the only manager that will definitely work on Python 2.5.