Design of the AMUSE interface. This diagram represents the way in which a community code (“code”) is accessed from the AMUSE framework. The code has a thin layer of interface functions in its native language which communicate through an MPI message channel with the Python host process. On the Python side the user script (“AMUSE simulation script”) only accesses generic calls (“setup”, “evolve” etc.) to a high level interface. This high level interface calls the low level interface functions, hiding details about units and the code implementation. The communication through the MPI channel does not interfere with the code’s own parallelization because the latter has its own MPI_WORLD_COMM context.