  Astronomers are increasingly using Massively Parallel Network of Workstations
(MP-NOW) to address their most challenging computing problems. Fully exploiting
these systems is made more difficult as more and more modeling and data
analysis software is written in interpreted languages (such as IDL, MATLAB, and
Mathematica) which do not lend themselves to parallel computing. We present a
specific example of a very simple, but generic solution to this problem. Our
example uses an interpreted language (IDL) to set up a calculation and then
interfaces with a computational kernel written in a compiled language (C). The
IDL code then calls the C code as an external library. We have added to the
computational kernel an additional layer, which manages multiple copies of the
kernel running on a MP-NOW and returns the results back to the interpreted
layer. Our implementation uses The Next generation Taskbag (TNT) library
developed at Sarnoff to provide an efficient means for implementing task
parallelism. A test problem (taken from Astronomy) has been implemented on the
Sarnoff Cyclone computer which consists of 160 heterogeneous nodes connected by
a ``fat'' tree 100 Mb/s switched Ethernet running the RedHat Linux and FreeBSD
operating systems. Our first results in this ongoing project have demonstrated
the feasibility of this approach and produced speedups of greater than 50 on 60
processors.
