Modern open source high-level languages such as R and Python are.increasingly playing an important role in increasing programmer productivity when programming high-performance computers. In this article, we describe Python Star-P, a high-level interactive parallel programming environment in Python. We discuss the architecture of the environment and the programming model along with a number of examples. We also describe the performance of the examples on .a cluster of multi-core machines. Finally, we compare our environment with that of other existing parallel computing tools for Python and describe the advantages of our model over others.