Book Image

Python Parallel Programming Cookbook

By : Giancarlo Zaccone
Book Image

Python Parallel Programming Cookbook

By: Giancarlo Zaccone

Overview of this book

This book will teach you parallel programming techniques using examples in Python and will help you explore the many ways in which you can write code that allows more than one process to happen at once. Starting with introducing you to the world of parallel computing, it moves on to cover the fundamentals in Python. This is followed by exploring the thread-based parallelism model using the Python threading module by synchronizing threads and using locks, mutex, semaphores queues, GIL, and the thread pool. Next you will be taught about process-based parallelism where you will synchronize processes using message passing along with learning about the performance of MPI Python Modules. You will then go on to learn the asynchronous parallel programming model using the Python asyncio module along with handling exceptions. Moving on, you will discover distributed computing with Python, and learn how to install a broker, use Celery Python Module, and create a worker. You will understand anche Pycsp, the Scoop framework, and disk modules in Python. Further on, you will learnGPU programming withPython using the PyCUDA module along with evaluating performance limitations.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Python Parallel Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using the mpi4py Python module


The Python programming language provides a number of MPI modules to write parallel programs. The most interesting of these is the mpi4py library. It is constructed on top of the MPI-1/2 specifications and provides an object-oriented interface, which closely follows MPI-2 C++ bindings. A C MPI user could use this module without learning a new interface. Therefore, it is widely used as an almost full package of an MPI library in Python.

The main applications of the module, which will be described in this chapter, are:

  • Point-to-point communication

  • Collective communication

  • Topologies

Getting ready

The installation procedure of mpi4py using a Windows machine is, as follows (for other OS, refer to http://mpi4py.scipy.org/docs/usrman/install.html#):

  1. Download the MPI software library mpich from http://www.mpich.org/downloads/.

    The MPICH download page

  2. Open an admin Command Prompt by right-clicking on the command prompt icon and select Run as administrator.

  3. Run msiexec /i mpich_installation_file...