Automatic parallelization of scripting languages: Toward transparent desktop parallel computing

Desktop computing remains indispensable in scientific exploration, largely because it provides people with devices for human interaction and environments for interactive job execution. However, with today's rapidly growing data volume and task complexity, it is increasingly hard for individual workstations to meet the demands of interactive scientific data processing. The increasing cost of such interactive processing is hindering the productivity of end-to-end scientific computing workflows. While existing distributed computing systems allow people to aggregate desktop workstation resources for parallel computing, the burden of explicit parallel programming and parallel job execution often prohibits scientists to take advantage of such platforms. In this paper, we discuss the need for transparent desktop parallel computing in scientific data processing. As an initial step toward this goal, we present our on-going work on the automatic parallelization of the scripting language R, a popular tool for statistical computing. Our preliminary results suggest that a reasonable speedup can be achieved on real-world sequential R programs without requiring any code modification.