Book Image

Python High Performance, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Dr. Gabriele Lanaro
Book Image

Python High Performance, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Dr. Gabriele Lanaro

Overview of this book

Python is a versatile language that has found applications in many industries. The clean syntax, rich standard library, and vast selection of third-party libraries make Python a wildly popular language. Python High Performance is a practical guide that shows how to leverage the power of both native and third-party Python libraries to build robust applications. The book explains how to use various profilers to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. The reader will learn how to effectively use NumPy and Cython to speed up numerical code. The book explains concepts of concurrent programming and how to implement robust and responsive applications using Reactive programming. Readers will learn how to write code for parallel architectures using Tensorflow and Theano, and use a cluster of computers for large-scale computations using technologies such as Dask and PySpark. By the end of the book, readers will have learned to achieve performance and scale from their Python applications.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Parallel Processing

With parallel processing by using multiple cores, you can increase the amount of calculations your program can do in a given time frame without needing a faster processor. The main idea is to divide a problem into independent subunits and use multiple cores to solve those subunits in parallel.

Parallel processing is necessary to tackle large-scale problems. Companies produce massive quantities of data every day that need to be stored in multiple computers and analyzed. Scientists and engineers run parallel code on supercomputers to simulate massive systems.

Parallel processing allows you to take advantage of multicore CPUs as well as GPUs that work extremely well with highly parallel problems. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • A brief introduction to the fundamentals of parallel processing
  • Illustrating how to parallelize simple problems with the multiprocessing Python library...