project_description.txt

Project Description (max 800 characters)
This section is an abstract of your project and should provide answers to the following questions, preferably in this order:

    What is the project objective and scope?
    What is the technical motivation for this project? Why is this work important?
    What do you plan to accomplish?
    How will you accomplish it?

The output of current large scale simulations has exceeded our ability to process on single computer node.  Current workflows cope with the quantity of data by either restricting the scientists flexibility in working with data (by using a special purpose visualization tool) or by reducing quantity of data she will consider.  This project aims to remove this dichotomy by developing the software infrastructure to *interactively* manipulate parallel datasets.  The project will develop:  a distributed array for the Python language that manages the details of memory distribution, a powerful, user-friendly interactive shell, and extend the parallel visualization tool VisIt to accept our distributed array as a data source.