PySHMEM: A High Productivity OpenSHMEM Interface for Python

OpenSHMEM is a well known high performance communication library implementing the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model. It exposes a broad range of one-sided communication semantics which maps well to modern network technologies and can achieve a level of performance that is close to that of network hardware. In this paper we explore how OpenSHMEM semantics can be integrated within the context of Python, a high level programming language that is widely used by the scientific community. In this work we introduce the PySHMEM library that provides simple and convenient interfaces for accessing OpenSHMEM functionality. The goal of this paper is twofold: (1) investigate how high-level programming semantics can be used to expose a high productivity interface for accessing low-level communication semantics, and (2) evaluate performance overheads imposed by Python with respect to native (C) OpenSHMEM performance.