Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Cyrille Rossant
Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Cyrille Rossant

Overview of this book

Python is one of the leading open source platforms for data science and numerical computing. IPython and the associated Jupyter Notebook offer efficient interfaces to Python for data analysis and interactive visualization, and they constitute an ideal gateway to the platform. IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook, Second Edition contains many ready-to-use, focused recipes for high-performance scientific computing and data analysis, from the latest IPython/Jupyter features to the most advanced tricks, to help you write better and faster code. You will apply these state-of-the-art methods to various real-world examples, illustrating topics in applied mathematics, scientific modeling, and machine learning. The first part of the book covers programming techniques: code quality and reproducibility, code optimization, high-performance computing through just-in-time compilation, parallel computing, and graphics card programming. The second part tackles data science, statistics, machine learning, signal and image processing, dynamical systems, and pure and applied mathematics.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization CookbookSecond Edition
Contributors
Preface
Index

Distributing Python code across multiple cores with IPython


Despite CPython's GIL, it is possible to execute several tasks in parallel on multi-core computers using multiple processes instead of multiple threads. Python offers a native multiprocessing module. IPython's parallel extension, called ipyparallel, offers an even simpler interface that brings powerful parallel computing features in an interactive environment. We will describe this tool here.

Getting started

You need to install ipyparallel with conda install ipyparallel.

Then, you need to activate the ipyparallel Jupyter extension with ipcluster nbextension enable --user.

How to do it...

  1. First, we launch four IPython engines in separate processes. We have basically two options to do this:

    • Executing ipcluster start -n 4 in a system shell

    • Using the web interface provided in Jupyter Notebook's main page by clicking on the IPython Clusters tab and launching four engines

  2. Then, we create a client that will act as a proxy to the IPython engines...