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

How to spawn a process


The term "spawn" means the creation of a process by a parent process. The parent process can of course continue its execution asynchronously or wait until the child process ends its execution. The multiprocessing library of Python allows the spawning of a process through the following steps:

  1. Build the object process.

  2. Call its start() method. This method starts the process's activity.

  3. Call its join()method. It waits until the process has completed its work and exited.

How to do it...

This example shows you how to create a series (five) of processes. Each process is associated with the function foo(i), where i is the ID associated with the process that contains it:

#Spawn a Process: Chapter 3: Process Based Parallelism
import multiprocessing

def foo(i):
    print ('called function in process: %s' %i)
    return

if __name__ == '__main__':
    Process_jobs = []
    for i in range(5):
        p = multiprocessing.Process(target=foo, args=(i,))
        Process_jobs.append(p)...