A New Community and Sustainability Path for Parsl

When Parsl first debuted in 2017, the goal of the project was to help those new to supercomputing figure out how to work with a scaled-up infrastructure. Researchers have been accustomed to using desktops and laptops in their work for years. Scaling research computing to include parallel and distributed computing can sound daunting to those who’ve never done it before. Parsl, co-founded by Daniel S. Katz, NCSA’s chief science officer, is just one of the tools created that have been making it simpler every year to incorporate these powerful resources into research plans.

Parsl is an open-source library that adds parallel programming features to Python. Parsl automatically creates a task dependency graph based on shared data, allowing tasks to run efficiently on different systems, whether a researcher is working on a laptop or in the cloud. A wide variety of researchers across many domains have taken advantage of the versatility of Parsl in their work.

NumFOCUS is a nonprofit organization that supports open code and open science. The organization’s mission is to promote open practices in research, data and scientific computing by serving as a fiscal sponsor for open-source projects and organizing community-driven educational programs. NumFOCUS accepted Parsl as a fiscally-sponsored project due to the group’s dedication to open source, open governance, sustainability and open science, all causes that Katz has long championed. The new membership means that Parsl is now part of a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

Parsl will benefit from this sponsorship in a number of ways. As Katz explains, “Part of Parsl’s sustainability plan has been to model our project on successful projects, and NumFOCUS projects are some of the key ones for us to follow. We also view NumFOCUS as a neutral platform that can help us open up our governance and leadership to those who want to participate.”

To read more about Parsl’s new membership in the NumFOCUS community, you can find the original announcement here: Parsl joins NumFOCUS as a Sponsored Project!