In our previous discussion on IPython in parallel computing (refer to Chapter 3, Stepping Up to IPython for Parallel Computing), it was demonstrated how using the map and apply functions can enable parallel computation with a minimal setup by the programmer. These methods return objects of the AsyncResult class (or a subclass). At that time, only a small subset of the class's functionality was required, so a more thorough exploration was delayed. In this section, we will provide a more complete description of the capabilities of an AsyncResult object.
The AsyncResult class provides a superset of the multiprocessing.pool.AsyncResult interface. We will start by looking at the multiprocessing.pool version before examining the new features.