SI2-SSE: Enhancement and Support of Swift Parallel Scripting

Swift并行脚本语言使科学家，工程师和数据分析师能够在分布式和并行计算平台上表达和协调应用程序的并行调用：这是科学和工程中执行计算的主要模式之一。 Swift运行在各种HPC集群和云上，使用户能够相对轻松地在计算环境之间移动应用程序脚本。Swift包括编程模型，脚本语言和运行时引擎。 它的隐式并行编程模型允许具有最少编程专业知识的用户透明地利用并行和分布式系统。脚本语言是简单的，最小的和独立的;编程模型也被嵌入到Python和R语言中。Swift被应用于许多不同的领域，包括生物化学、神经科学、气候模型分析、地震模拟、水文学、能源预测、经济建模、大众媒体分析、材料科学和天文学。该项目增强了Swift的可用性和编程表现力，扩大其实用程序库，进行为大规模的国家和全球社区服务所需的测试和强化，并扩充现有的文件和培训材料，以建立和服务于广泛的用户基础。Swift还在配置、脚本调试、异常处理、并行收集处理以及数据类型和映射方面进行了改进，以提高Swift的生产力。Swift使很少或没有并行编程经验的用户能够利用从桌面到千万亿次超级计算机的并行和分布式计算环境。它向广泛的科学用户社区开放了强大的网络基础设施，如XSEDE，开放科学网格，FutureGrid和Blue沃茨，从而扩大了对高性能计算的参与。

The Swift parallel scripting language enables scientists, engineers, and data analysts to express and coordinate parallel invocations of application programs on distributed and parallel computing platforms: one of the dominant modes of performing computation in science and engineering. Swift runs on a variety of HPC clusters and clouds, and enables users to move their application scripts between computing environments with relative ease.Swift comprises a programming model, scripting language, and runtime engine. Its implicitly parallel programming model allows users with minimal programming expertise to transparently utilize parallel and distributed systems. The scripting language is simple, minimal and standalone; the programming model has also been embedded into the Python and R languages.Swift is employed in many diverse domains, including biochemistry, neuroscience, climate model analysis, earthquake simulation, hydrology, energy forecasting, economics modeling, mass media analysis, materials science, and astronomy.This project makes usability and programmatic expressiveness enhancements to Swift, broadens its utility library, performs the testing and hardening needed to serve a large-scale national and global community, and extends existing documentation and training material in a manner that will create and serve a broad user base. It also develops enhancements in configuration, script debugging, exception handling, parallel collection processing, and data typing and mapping to make Swift increasingly productive.Swift enables users with little or no experience in parallel programming to leverage parallel and distributed computing environments ranging in scale from desktops to petascale supercomputers. It opens up powerful cyberinfrastructure like XSEDE, Open Science Grid, FutureGrid, and Blue Waters to a wide range and scale of scientific user communities, thus broadening participation in high performance computing.