Once you SCOOP, no need to fork

This paper presents SCOOP, a new Python framework for automatically distributing dynamic task hierarchies. A task hierarchy refers to tasks that can recursively spawn an arbitrary number of subtasks. The underlying computing infrastructure consists of a simple list of resources. The typical use case is to run the user's main program under the umbrella of the SCOOP module, where it becomes a root task that can spawn any number of subtasks through the standard "futures" API of Python, and where these subtasks may themselves spawn other subsubtasks, etc. The full task hierarchy is dynamic in the sense that it is unknown until the end of the last running task. SCOOP automatically distributes tasks amongst available resources using dynamic load balancing. A task is nothing more than a Python callable object in conjunction with its arguments. The user need not worry about message passing implementation details; all communications are implicit.