Chapter 1, An Introduction to Parallel and Distributed Computing, takes you through the basic theoretical foundations of parallel and distributed computing.

Chapter 2, Asynchronous Programming, describes the two main programming styles used in distributed applications: synchronous and asynchronous programming.

Chapter 3, Parallelism in Python, shows you how to do more than one thing at the same time in your Python code, using nothing more than the Python standard library.

Chapter 4, Distributed Applications – with Celery, teaches you how to build simple distributed applications using Celery and some of its competitors: Python-RQ and Pyro.

Chapter 5, Python in the Cloud, shows how you can deploy your Python applications on the cloud using Amazon Web Services.

Chapter 6, Python on an HPC Cluster, shows how to deploy your Python applications on a classic HPC cluster, typical of many universities and national labs.

Chapter 7, Testing and Debugging Distributed Applications, talks about the challenges of testing, profiling, and debugging distributed applications in Python.

Chapter 8, The Road Ahead, looks at what you have learned so far and which directions interested readers could take to push their development of distributed systems further.

The following software and hardware is recommended:

All software mentioned in this book is free of charge and can be downloaded from the Internet with the exception of PBS Pro, which is commercial. Most of the PBS Pro functionality, however, is available in its close sibling Torque, which is open source.

This book is for developers who already know Python and want to learn how to parallelize their code and/or write distributed systems. While a Unix environment is assumed, most if not all of the examples should also work on Windows systems.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Import the concurrent.futures module."

A block of code is set as follows:

class Foo:
    def __init__(self):
        """Docstring"""
        self.bar = 42
        # A comment
        return

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

bookuser@hostname$ python3.5 ./foo.py

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."

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