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Multicore programming

At the company where I am interning, I was told about the use of multi-core programming and, in view of a project I am developing for my thesis (I'm not from the area but I'm working on something that involves coding).
I want to know if this is possible:I have a defined function that will be repeated 3x for 3 different variables. Is it possible to put the 3 running at the same time in different core (because they don't need each other information)? Because the calculation process is the same for all of them and instead of running 1 variable at a time, I would like to run all 3 at once (performing all the calculations at the same time) and in the end returning the results.
Some part of what I would like to optimize:
for v in [obj2_v1, obj2_v2, obj2_v3]:
distancia_final_v, \
pontos_intersecao_final_v = calculo_vertice( obj1_normal,
obj1_v1,
obj1_v2,
obj1_v3,
obj2_normal,
v,
criterio
)
def calculo_vertice( obj1_normal,
obj1_v1,
obj1_v2,
obj1_v3,
obj2_normal,
obj2_v,
criterio
):
i = 0
distancia_final_v = []
pontos_intersecao_final_v = []
while i < len(obj2_v):
distancia_relevante_v = []
pontos_intersecao_v = []
distancia_inicial = 1000
for x in range(len(obj1_v1)):
planeNormal = np.array( [obj1_normal[x][0],
obj1_normal[x][1],
obj1_normal[x][2]
] )
planePoint = np.array( [ obj1_v1[x][0],
obj1_v1[x][1],
obj1_v1[x][2]
] ) # Any point on the plane
rayDirection = np.array([obj2_normal[i][0],
obj2_normal[i][1],
obj2_normal[i][2]
] ) # Define a ray
rayPoint = np.array([ obj2_v[i][0],
obj2_v[i][1],
obj2_v[i][2]
] ) # Any point along the ray
Psi = Calculos.line_plane_collision( planeNormal,
planePoint,
rayDirection,
rayPoint
)
a = Calculos.area_trianglo_3d( obj1_v1[x][0],
obj1_v1[x][1],
obj1_v1[x][2],
obj1_v2[x][0],
obj1_v2[x][1],
obj1_v2[x][2],
obj1_v3[x][0],
obj1_v3[x][1],
obj1_v3[x][2]
)
b = Calculos.area_trianglo_3d( obj1_v1[x][0],
obj1_v1[x][1],
obj1_v1[x][2],
obj1_v2[x][0],
obj1_v2[x][1],
obj1_v2[x][2],
Psi[0][0],
Psi[0][1],
Psi[0][2]
)
c = Calculos.area_trianglo_3d( obj1_v1[x][0],
obj1_v1[x][1],
obj1_v1[x][2],
obj1_v3[x][0],
obj1_v3[x][1],
obj1_v3[x][2],
Psi[0][0],
Psi[0][1],
Psi[0][2]
)
d = Calculos.area_trianglo_3d( obj1_v2[x][0],
obj1_v2[x][1],
obj1_v2[x][2],
obj1_v3[x][0],
obj1_v3[x][1],
obj1_v3[x][2],
Psi[0][0],
Psi[0][1],
Psi[0][2]
)
if float("{:.5f}".format(a)) == float("{:.5f}".format(b + c + d)):
P1 = Ponto( Psi[0][0], Psi[0][1], Psi[0][2] )
P2 = Ponto( obj2_v[i][0], obj2_v[i][1], obj2_v[i][2] )
distancia = Calculos.distancia_pontos( P1, P2 ) * 10
if distancia < distancia_inicial and distancia < criterio:
distancia_inicial = distancia
distancia_relevante_v = []
distancia_relevante_v.append( distancia_inicial )
pontos_intersecao_v = []
pontos_intersecao_v.append( Psi )
x += 1
distancia_final_v.append( distancia_relevante_v )
pontos_intersecao_final_v.append( pontos_intersecao_v )
i += 1
return distancia_final_v, pontos_intersecao_final_v
In this example of my code, I want to make the same process happen for obj2_v1, obj2_v2, obj2_v3.
Is it possible to make them happen at the same time?
Because I will be using a considerable amount of data and it would probably save me some time of processing.

multiprocessing (using processes to avoid the GIL) is the easiest but you're limited to relatively small performance improvements, number of cores speedup is the limit, see Amdahl's law. there's also a bit of latency involved in starting / stopping work which means it's much better for things that take >10ms
in numeric heavy code (like this seems to be) you really want to be moving as much of the it "inside numpy", look at vectorisation and broadcasting. this can give speedups of >50x (just on a single core) while staying easier to understand and reason about
if your algorithm is difficult to express using numpy intrinsics then you could also look at using Cython. this allows you to write Python code that automatically gets compiled down to C, and hence a lot faster. 50x faster is probably also a reasonable speedup, and this is still running on a single core
the numpy and Cython techniques can be combined with multiprocessing (i.e. using multiple cores) to give code that runs hundreds of times faster than naive implementations
Jupyter notebooks have friendly extensions (known affectionately as "magic") that make it easier to get started with this sort of performance work. the %timeit special allows you to easily time parts of the code, and the Cython extension means you can put everything into the same file

It's possible, but use python multiprocessing lib, because the threading lib doesn't delivery parallel execution.
UPDATE
DON'T do something like that (thanks for #user3666197 for pointing the error) :
from multiprocessing.pool import ThreadPool
def calculo_vertice(obj1_normal,obj1_v1,obj1_v2,obj1_v3,obj2_normal,obj2_v,criterio):
#your code
return distancia_final_v,pontos_intersecao_final_v
pool = ThreadPool(processes=3)
async_result1 = pool.apply_async(calculo_vertice, (#your args here))
async_result2 = pool.apply_async(calculo_vertice, (#your args here))
async_result3 = pool.apply_async(calculo_vertice, (#your args here))
result1 = async_result1.get() # result1
result2 = async_result2.get() # result2
result3 = async_result3.get() # result3
Instead, something like this should do the job:
from multiprocessing import Process, Pipe
def calculo_vertice(obj1_normal,obj1_v1,obj1_v2,obj1_v3,obj2_normal,obj2_v,criterio, send_end):
#your code
send_end.send((distancia_final_v,pontos_intersecao_final_v))
numberOfWorkers = 3
jobs = []
pipeList = []
#Start process and build job list
for i in range(numberOfWorkers):
recv_end, send_end = Pipe(False)
process = Process(target=calculo_vertice, args=(#<... your args...>#, send_end))
jobs.append(process)
pipeList.append(recv_end)
process.start()
#Show the results
for job in jobs: job.join()
resultList = [x.recv() for x in pipeList]
print (resultList)
REF.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html
https://stackoverflow.com/a/37737985/8738174
This code will create a pool of 3 working process and each of it will async receive the function. It's important to point that in this case you should have 3+ CPU cores, otherwise, your system kernel will just switch between process and things won't real run in parallel.

Q : " Is it possible to make them happen at the same time? "
Yes.
The best results ever will be get if not adding any python ( the multiprocessing module is not necessary at all for doing 3 full-copies ( yes, top-down fully replicated copies ) of the __main__ python process for this so embarrasingly independent processing ).
The reasons for this are explained in detail here and here.
A just-enough tool is GNU's :$ parallel --jobs 3 python job-script.py {} ::: "v1" "v2" "v3"
For all performance-tweaking, read about more configuration details in man parallel.
"Because I will be using a considerable amount of data..."
The Devil is hidden in the details :
The O/P code may be syntactically driving the python interpreter to results, precise (approximate) within some 5 decimal places, yet the core sin is it's ultimately bad chances to demonstrate any reasonably achievable performance in doing that, the worse on "considerable amount of data".
If they, "at the company", expect some "considerable amount of data", you should do at least some elementary research on what is the processing aimed at.
The worst part ( not mentioning the decomposition of once vectorised-ready numpy-arrays back into atomic "float" coordinate values ) is the point-inside-triangle test.
For a brief analysis on how to speed-up this part ( the more if going to pour "considerable amount of data" on doing this ), get inspired from this post and get the job done in fraction of the time it was drafted in the O/P above.
Indirect testing of a point-inside-triangle by comparing an in-equality of a pair of re-float()-ed-strings, received from sums of triangle-areas ( b + c + d ) is just one of the performance blockers, you will find to get removed.

Writing to file in Pool multiprocessing (Python 2.7)

I'm doing a lot of calculations writing the results to a file. Using multiprocessing I'm trying to parallelise the calculations.
Problem here is that I'm writing to one output file, which all the workers are writing too. I'm quite new to multiprocessing, and wondering how I could make it work.
A very simple concept of the code is given below:
from multiprocessing import Pool
fout_=open('test'+'.txt','w')
def f(x):
fout_.write(str(x) + "\n")
if __name__ == '__main__':
p = Pool(5)
p.map(f, [1, 2, 3])
The result I want would be a file with:
1 2 3
However now I get an empty file. Any suggestions?
I greatly appreciate any help :)!

You shouldn't be letting all the workers/processes write to a single file. They can all read from one file (which may cause slow downs due to workers waiting for one of them to finish reading), but writing to the same file will cause conflicts and potentially corruption.
Like said in the comments, write to separate files instead and then combine them into one on a single process. This small program illustrates it based on the program in your post:
from multiprocessing import Pool
def f(args):
''' Perform computation and write
to separate file for each '''
x = args[0]
fname = args[1]
with open(fname, 'w') as fout:
fout.write(str(x) + "\n")
def fcombine(orig, dest):
''' Combine files with names in
orig into one file named dest '''
with open(dest, 'w') as fout:
for o in orig:
with open(o, 'r') as fin:
for line in fin:
fout.write(line)
if __name__ == '__main__':
# Each sublist is a combination
# of arguments - number and temporary output
# file name
x = range(1,4)
names = ['temp_' + str(y) + '.txt' for y in x]
args = list(zip(x,names))
p = Pool(3)
p.map(f, args)
p.close()
p.join()
fcombine(names, 'final.txt')
It runs f for each argument combination which in this case are value of x and temporary file name. It uses a nested list of argument combinations since pool.map does not accept more than one arguments. There are other way to go around this, especially on newer Python versions.
For each argument combination and pool member it creates a separate file to which it writes the output. In principle your output will be longer, you can simply add another function that computes it to the f function. Also, no need to use Pool(5) for 3 arguments (though I assume that only three workers were active anyway).
Reasons for calling close() and join() are explained well in this post. It turns out (in the comment to the linked post) that map is blocking, so here you don't need them for the original reasons (wait till they all finish and then write to the combined output file from just one process). I would still use them in case other parallel features are added later.
In the last step, fcombine gathers and copies all the temporary files into one. It's a bit too nested, if you for instance decide to remove the temporary file after copying, you may want to use a separate function under the with open('dest', ).. or the for loop underneath - for readability and functionality.

Multiprocessing.pool spawns processes, writing to a common file without lock from each process can cause data loss.
As you said you are trying to parallelise the calculation, multiprocessing.pool can be used to parallelize the computation.
Below is the solution that do parallel computation and writes the result in file, hope it helps:
from multiprocessing import Pool
# library for time
import datetime
# file in which you want to write
fout = open('test.txt', 'wb')
# function for your calculations, i have tried it to make time consuming
def calc(x):
x = x**2
sum = 0
for i in range(0, 1000000):
sum += i
return x
# function to write in txt file, it takes list of item to write
def f(res):
global fout
for x in res:
fout.write(str(x) + "\n")
if __name__ == '__main__':
qs = datetime.datetime.now()
arr = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
p = Pool(5)
res = p.map(calc, arr)
# write the calculated list in file
f(res)
qe = datetime.datetime.now()
print (qe-qs).total_seconds()*1000
# to compare the improvement using multiprocessing, iterative solution
qs = datetime.datetime.now()
for item in arr:
x = calc(item)
fout.write(str(x)+"\n")
qe = datetime.datetime.now()
print (qe-qs).total_seconds()*1000

Q: How to write a function output in a .CSV file with multi-threading / multiprocessing ? (Using a String array as input)

I am coding a little web scraper where I would like to implement multiprocessing / multi-threading.
I have written my function webScraper() which receives a String with a website URL as input, scrapes some domain data and writes that data to a CSV file, line by line (for each domain).
The input data with all the URLs is saved in a String array like this :
urls = ["google.com", "yahoo.com", "bing.com"]. (I consider changing to URL import from CSV file.)
How can I use multiprocessing and write the function output to a CSV file without having inconsistencies and index out of bounds errors? I found a nice looking script, which seems to be exactly what I need. Unfortunately, I just switched to Python from Java a few days ago and can't figure out what I need to change exactly.
So basically, I just want to change the script below, so that it calls my function webScraper(url) for each URL that is in my String array urls or Input CSV file. The script should then write the function output for each array item line by line into my CSV (if I understood the code correctly).
That's the code I am working on (Thanks to hbar for the nice code!)
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
# multiproc_sums.py
"""A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their
sums to another CSV file, using multiple processes if desired.
"""
import csv
import multiprocessing
import optparse
import sys
NUM_PROCS = multiprocessing.cpu_count()
def make_cli_parser():
"""Make the command line interface parser."""
usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV",
__doc__,
"""
ARGUMENTS:
INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers
OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\
"""])
cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage)
cli_parser.add_option('-n', '--numprocs', type='int',
default=NUM_PROCS,
help="Number of processes to launch [DEFAULT: %default]")
return cli_parser
class CSVWorker(object):
def __init__(self, numprocs, infile, outfile):
self.numprocs = numprocs
self.infile = open(infile)
self.outfile = outfile
self.in_csvfile = csv.reader(self.infile)
self.inq = multiprocessing.Queue()
self.outq = multiprocessing.Queue()
self.pin = multiprocessing.Process(target=self.parse_input_csv, args=())
self.pout = multiprocessing.Process(target=self.write_output_csv, args=())
self.ps = [ multiprocessing.Process(target=self.sum_row, args=())
for i in range(self.numprocs)]
self.pin.start()
self.pout.start()
for p in self.ps:
p.start()
self.pin.join()
i = 0
for p in self.ps:
p.join()
print "Done", i
i += 1
self.pout.join()
self.infile.close()
def parse_input_csv(self):
"""Parses the input CSV and yields tuples with the index of the row
as the first element, and the integers of the row as the second
element.
The index is zero-index based.
The data is then sent over inqueue for the workers to do their
thing. At the end the input process sends a 'STOP' message for each
worker.
"""
for i, row in enumerate(self.in_csvfile):
row = [ int(entry) for entry in row ]
self.inq.put( (i, row) )
for i in range(self.numprocs):
self.inq.put("STOP")
def sum_row(self):
"""
Workers. Consume inq and produce answers on outq
"""
tot = 0
for i, row in iter(self.inq.get, "STOP"):
self.outq.put( (i, sum(row)) )
self.outq.put("STOP")
def write_output_csv(self):
"""
Open outgoing csv file then start reading outq for answers
Since I chose to make sure output was synchronized to the input there
is some extra goodies to do that.
Obviously your input has the original row number so this is not
required.
"""
cur = 0
stop = 0
buffer = {}
# For some reason csv.writer works badly across processes so open/close
# and use it all in the same process or else you'll have the last
# several rows missing
outfile = open(self.outfile, "w")
self.out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile)
#Keep running until we see numprocs STOP messages
for works in range(self.numprocs):
for i, val in iter(self.outq.get, "STOP"):
# verify rows are in order, if not save in buffer
if i != cur:
buffer[i] = val
else:
#if yes are write it out and make sure no waiting rows exist
self.out_csvfile.writerow( [i, val] )
cur += 1
while cur in buffer:
self.out_csvfile.writerow([ cur, buffer[cur] ])
del buffer[cur]
cur += 1
outfile.close()
def main(argv):
cli_parser = make_cli_parser()
opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv)
if len(args) != 2:
cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.")
c = CSVWorker(opts.numprocs, args[0], args[1])
if __name__ == '__main__':
main(sys.argv[1:])
The whole thing wouldn't really be a problem for me, if there was no writting to a CSV file involved in the multiprocessing. I already tried a different solution Python Map Pool (link) but without success. I think there were inconsistencies among the Pools which led to errors.
Thanks for your ideas!

The way I would handle this is by using multiprocessing to do the web scraping, and then using a single process to write out to a csv. I'm willing to bet that the scraping is the time consuming part, and the I/O is quick. Below is a snippet of code that uses Pool.map to multiprocess your function.
import multiprocessing as mp
import csv
pool = mp.Pool( processes=mp.cpu_count() )
# or however many processors you can support
scraped_data = pool.map( webScraper, urls )
with open('out.csv') as outfile:
wr = csv.writer(outfile)
wr.writerow(scraped_data)

Optimize parsing of GB sized files in parallel

I have several compressed files with sizes on the order of 2GB compressed. The beginning of each file has a set of headers which I parse and extract a list of ~4,000,000 pointers (pointers).
For each pair of pointers (pointers[i], pointers[i+1]) for 0 <= i < len(pointers), I
seek to pointers[i]
read pointers[i+1]-pointer[i]
decompress it
do a single pass operation on that data and update a dictionary with what I find.
The issue is, I can only process roughly 30 of pointer pairs a second using a single Python process, which means each file takes more than a day to get through.
Assuming splitting up the pointers list among multiple processes doesn't hurt performance (due to each process looking at the same file, though different non-overlapping parts), how can I use multiprocessing to speed this up?
My single threaded operation looks like this:
def search_clusters(pointers, filepath, automaton, counter):
def _decompress_lzma(f, pointer, chunk_size=2**14):
# skipping over this
...
return uncompressed_buffer
first_pointer, last_pointer = pointers[0], pointers[-1]
with open(filepath, 'rb') as fh:
fh.seek(first_pointer)
f = StringIO(fh.read(last_pointer - first_pointer))
for pointer1, pointer2 in zip(pointers, pointers[1:]):
size = pointer2 - pointer1
f.seek(pointer1 - first_pointer)
buffer = _decompress_lzma(f, 0)
# skipping details, ultimately the counter dict is
# modified passing the uncompressed buffer through
# an aho corasick automaton
counter = update_counter_with_buffer(buffer, automaton, counter)
return counter
# parse file and return pointers list
bzf = ZimFile(infile)
pointers = bzf.cluster_pointers
counter = load_counter_dict() # returns collections.Counter()
automaton = load_automaton()
search_clusters(pointers, infile, autmaton, counter)
I tried changing this to use multiprocessing.Pool:
from itertools import repeat, izip
import logging
import multiprocessing
logger = multiprocessing.log_to_stderr()
logger.setLevel(multiprocessing.SUBDEBUG)
def chunked(pointers, chunksize=1024):
for i in range(0, len(pointers), chunksize):
yield list(pointers[i:i+chunksize+1])
def search_wrapper(args):
return search_clusters(*args)
# parse file and return pointers list
bzf = ZimFile(infile)
pointers = bzf.cluster_pointers
counter = load_counter_dict() # returns collections.Counter()
map_args = izip(chunked(cluster_pointers), repeat(infile),
repeat(automaton.copy()), repeat(word_counter.copy()))
pool = multiprocessing.Pool(20)
results = pool.map(search_wrapper, map_args)
pool.close()
pool.join()
but after a little while of processing, I get the following message and the script just hangs there with no further output:
[DEBUG/MainProcess] cleaning up worker 0
[DEBUG/MainProcess] added worker
[INFO/PoolWorker-20] child process calling self.run()
However, if I run with a serialized version of map without multiprocessing, things run just fine:
map(search_wrapper, map_args)
Any advice on how to change my multiprocessing code so it doesn't hang? Is it even a good idea to attempt to use multiple processes to read the same file?

Pythonic way of importing 'complex' script result to another script

This is probably going to be flagged as duplicate as I went through a lot of post on that matter, but I really need help for that particular example.
So let say that I have a main script built for plotting some data, and then a few other scripts that I would like to import into that main plotting script in order, well, to retrieve those data.
I found that the most pythonic way of doing so is to import the script and then use it like a module, but since I am pretty new to Python I can't figure out how to properly do it with those pieces of code.
I use code written by someone else and adapted to fit my purpose so that might be an issue too.
I wanted to save some resources and avoid to write and read files to disk for every step so that is why I want to extract the data within my plotting script and have my pandas panel available in memory for plotting purpose.
Ideally my master_plot.py would look like that:
#functions for the plotting part
if __name__ == '__main__':
import Tab
data= Tab.main(some_path) #this script would calculate tab and return a pd.panel that will be used by the plotting section
plot(data)
Now for the actual tab script:
#!/usr/bin/env python
class SubDomains( object ):
'''
a class that reads in and prepares a dataset to be used in masking
'''
def __init__( self, fiona_shape, rasterio_raster, id_field, **kwargs ):
#do stuff
#staticmethod
def rasterize_subdomains( fiona_shape, rasterio_raster, id_field ):
from rasterio.features import rasterize
import six
import numpy as np
#do stuff
def _domains_name( self, fiona_shape, rasterio_raster, **kwargs ):
#do stuff
def _domains_generator( self, **kwargs ):
#do stuff
def extract_tab( filelist, subdomains_arr ):
'''
extract the number of burned pixels across subdomains
'''
def read_firescar( x ):
#do stuff
def tab_counts( x ):
#do stuff
def get_year_fn( x ):
#do stuff
return pd.DataFrame( rep_arr ).T
def tab_processing(maps_path):
l = pd.Series( sorted( glob.glob( os.path.join( maps_path, 'FireScar*.tif' ) ) ) )
# now lets groupby the repnum by splitting the filenames with a function
def get_rep_fn( x ):
''' function to split the repnum out of an ALF output filename '''
return os.path.basename( x ).split( '_' )[ 1 ]
rep_groups = l.groupby( l.map( get_rep_fn ) )
# initialize a SubDomains object
sub_domains = SubDomains( shp, rasterio.open( l[0] ), 'Id' )
# now extract the newly rasterized sub domains numpy array
subdomains_arr = sub_domains.sub_domains
pool = mp.Pool( 32 )
out = pool.map( lambda x: extract_tab( x, subdomains_arr ), [ group.tolist() for rep_num, group in rep_groups ] )
pool.close()
# now there is a list of pd.DataFrame objects that we can collapse into a single 3-D pd.Panel
rep_list = sorted( [ int(rep_num) for rep_num, group in rep_groups ] )
year_list = sorted( out[0].index.astype(int) )
# rep_list = np.repeat( rep_list, len(year_list) )
# year_list = np.array([year_list for i in range(len(rep_list)) ]).ravel()
tab_panel = pd.Panel( { i:j for i,j in zip(rep_list, out) } )
return tab_panel
if __name__ == '__main__':
import os, sys, re, rasterio, glob, fiona, shapely
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from pathos import multiprocessing as mp
from collections import defaultdict
path = sys.argv[1]
tab_processing(path)
This script was a standalone before so I am not sure if the best way would be to call subprocess or if it could still be used as a module. One of the issue with this exact version is global name 'pd' is not defined which makes sense, but I don't really see how to fix that problem, as all the functions and classes are used in the tab_processing function. I wish that I could just run the whole thing instead of just running one function, so then maybe subprocess is the best practice here?
Not sure if it changes anything but this goes through a lot of data and so need to be pretty efficient resource-wise.