Productivity, Portability, Performance, and Reproducibility: Data-Centric Python
Alexandros Nikolaos Ziogas, Timo Schneider, Tal Ben‐Nun, Alexandru Calotoiu, Tiziano De Matteis, Johannes de Fine Licht, Luca Lavarini, Torsten Hoefler · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems · 2025
Python has become thede factolanguage for scientific computing. Programming in Python is highly productive, mainly due to its rich science-oriented software ecosystem built around the NumPy module. As a result, the demand for Python support in High-Performance Computing (HPC) has skyrocketed. However, the Python language itself does not necessarily offer high performance. This work presents a workflow that retains Python’s high productivity while achieving portable performance across different architectures. The workflow’s key features are HPC-oriented language extensions and a set of automatic optimizations powered by a data-centric intermediate representation. We show performance results and scaling across CPU, GPU, FPGA, and the Piz Daint supercomputer (up to 23,328 cores), with 2.47x and 3.75x speedups over previous-best solutions, first-ever Xilinx and Intel FPGA results of annotated Python, and up to 93.16% scaling efficiency on 512 nodes. Our benchmarks were reproduced in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) during the Supercomputing Conference (SC) 2022. We present and discuss the student teams’ results.