dispy

Distributed and Parallel Computing Framework with / for Python

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Python

dispy

.. note:: Full documentation for dispy is now available at `dispy.org
          <https://dispy.org>`_.

dispy <https://dispy.org>_ is a comprehensive, yet easy
to use framework for creating and using compute clusters to execute computations
in parallel across multiple processors in a single machine (SMP), among many
machines in a cluster, grid or cloud. dispy is well suited for data parallel
(SIMD) paradigm where a computation is evaluated with different (large) datasets
independently with no communication among computation tasks (except for
computation tasks sending intermediate results to the client).

dispy works with Python versions 2.7+ and 3.1+ on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows; it may
work on other platforms (e.g., FreeBSD and other BSD variants) too.

Features

  • dispy is implemented with pycos <https://pycos.org>,
    an independent framework for asynchronous, concurrent, distributed, network
    programming with tasks (without threads). pycos uses non-blocking sockets with
    I/O notification mechanisms epoll, kqueue and poll, and Windows I/O Completion
    Ports (IOCP) for high performance and scalability, so dispy works efficiently
    with a single node or large cluster(s) of nodes. pycos itself has support for
    distributed/parallel computing, including transferring computations, files
    etc., and message passing (for communicating with client and other computation
    tasks). While dispy can be used to schedule jobs of a computation to get the
    results, pycos can be used to create distributed communicating processes <https://pycos.org/dispycos.html>
    , for broad range of use cases.

  • Computations (Python functions or standalone programs) and their
    dependencies (files, Python functions, classes, modules) are
    distributed automatically.

  • Computation nodes can be anywhere on the network (local or
    remote). For security, either simple hash based authentication or
    SSL encryption can be used.

  • After each execution is finished, the results of execution, output,
    errors and exception trace are made available for further
    processing.

  • Nodes may become available dynamically: dispy will schedule jobs
    whenever a node is available and computations can use that node.

  • If callback function is provided, dispy executes that function
    when a job is finished; this can be used for processing job
    results as they become available.

  • Client-side and server-side fault recovery are supported:

    If user program (client) terminates unexpectedly (e.g., due to
    uncaught exception), the nodes continue to execute scheduled
    jobs. If client-side fault recover option is used when creating a
    cluster, the results of the scheduled (but unfinished at the time of
    crash) jobs for that cluster can be retrieved later.

    If a computation is marked reentrant when a cluster is created and a
    node (server) executing jobs for that computation fails, dispy
    automatically resubmits those jobs to other available nodes.

  • dispy can be used in a single process to use all the nodes
    exclusively (with JobCluster - simpler to use) or in multiple
    processes simultaneously sharing the nodes (with
    SharedJobCluster and dispyscheduler program).

  • Cluster can be monitored and managed <https:/dispy.org/httpd.html>_ with web browser.

Dependencies

dispy requires pycos_ for concurrent, asynchronous network programming with tasks. pycos is
automatically installed if dispy is installed with pip. Under Windows efficient polling notifier
I/O Completion Ports (IOCP) is supported only if pywin32 <https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32>_
is installed; otherwise, inefficient select notifier is used.

Installation

To install dispy, run::

python -m pip install dispy

Release Notes

Short summary of changes for each release can be found at News <https://pycos.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=11>. Detailed logs / changes are at
github commits <https://github.com/pgiri/dispy/commits/master>
.

Authors

  • Giridhar Pemmasani

Links

  • Documentation is at dispy.org_.
  • Examples <https://dispy.org/examples.html>_.
  • Github (Code Respository) <https://github.com/pgiri/dispy>_.