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

Testing your GPU application with PyOpenCL


In this chapter, we comparatively tested the performance between a CPU and GPU. Before you begin the study of the performance of algorithms, it is important to keep in mind the platform of execution on which the tests were conducted. In fact, the specific characteristics of these systems interfere with the computational time and they represent an aspect of primary importance.

To perform the tests, we used the following machines

  • GPU: GeForce GT 240

  • CPU: Intel Core2 Duo 2.33 Ghz

  • RAM: DDR2 4 Gb

How to do it…

In this test, the computation time of a simple mathematical operation, that is, the sum of two vectors with elements expressed in a floating point will be evaluated and compared. To make a comparison, the same operation was implemented in two separate functions.

The first one uses only the CPU, while the second is written using PyOpenCL and makes use of the GPU for calculation. The test is performed on vectors of a dimension equal to 10,000 elements...