The goal of IPython is to create a comprehensive environment for
interactive and exploratory computing. To support this goal, IPython
has two main components:

* An enhanced interactive Python shell.
* An architecture for interactive parallel computing.

The enhanced interactive Python shell has the following main features:

* Comprehensive object introspection.
* Input history, persistent across sessions.
* Caching of output results during a session with automatically
generated references.
* Readline based name completion.
* Extensible system of 'magic' commands for controlling the
environment and performing many tasks related either to IPython or
the operating system.
* Configuration system with easy switching between different setups
(simpler than changing $PYTHONSTARTUP environment variables every
time).
* Session logging and reloading.
* Extensible syntax processing for special purpose situations.
* Access to the system shell with user-extensible alias system.
* Easily embeddable in other Python programs and wxPython GUIs.
* Integrated access to the pdb debugger and the Python profiler.

The parallel computing architecture has the following main features:

* Quickly parallelize Python code from an interactive Python/IPython
session.
* A flexible and dynamic process model that be deployed on anything
from multicore workstations to supercomputers.
* An architecture that supports many different styles of parallelism,
from message passing to task farming.
* Both blocking and fully asynchronous interfaces.
* High level APIs that enable many things to be parallelized in a few
lines of code.
* Share live parallel jobs with other users securely.
* Dynamically load balanced task farming system.
* Robust error handling in parallel code.