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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.

How to insert all occurances in list[] into CompositeVideoClip

I have a video where I want to insert a dynamic amount of TextClip(s). I have a while loop that handles the logic for actually creating the different TextClips and giving them individual durations & start_times (this works). I do however have a problem with actually "compiling" the video itself with inserting these texts.
Code for creating a TextClip (that works).
text = mpy.TextClip(str(contents),
color='white', size=[1700, 395], method='caption').set_duration(
int(list[i - 1])).set_start(currentTime).set_position(("center", 85))
print(str(i) + " written")
textList.append(text)
Code to "compile" the video. (that doesn't work)
final_clip = CompositeVideoClip([clip, len(textList)])
final_clip.write_videofile("files/final/TEST.mp4")
I tried several approaches but now I'm stuck and can't figure out a way to continue. Before I get a lot of "answers" telling me to do a while loop on the compiling, let me just say that the actual compiling takes about 5 minutes and I have 100-500 different texts I need implemented in the final video which would take days. Instead I want to add them one by one and then do 1 big final compile which I know it will take slightly longer than 5 minutes, but still a lot quicker than 2-3 days.
For those of you that may not have used moviepy before I will post a snippet of "my code" that actually works, not in the way I need it to though.
final_clip = CompositeVideoClip([clip, textList[0], textList[1], textList[2]])
final_clip.write_videofile("files/final/TEST.mp4")
This works exactly as intended (adding 3 texts), However I dont/can't know how many texts there will be in each video beforehand so I need to somehow insert a dynamic amount of textList[] into the function.
Kind regards,

Unsure what the arguments after clip, do (you could clarify), but if the problem's solved by inserting a variable number of textList[i] args, the solution's simple:
CompositeVideoClip([clip, *textList])
The star unpacks the list (or any iterable); ex: arg=4,5 -- def f(a,b): return a+b -- f(*arg)==9. If you have many textLists, you can manage them via a nested list or a dictionary:
textListDict = {'1':textList1, '2':textList2, ...}
textListNest = [textList1, textList2, ...] # probably preferable - using for below
# now iterate:
for textList in textListNest:
final_clip = CompositeVideoClip([clip, *textList])
Unpacking demo:
def show_then_join(a, b, c):
print("a={}, b={}, c={}".format(a,b,c))
print(''.join("{}{}{}".format(a,b,c)))
some_list = [1, 2, 'dog']
show_then_sum(*some_list) # only one arg is passed in, but is unpacked into three
# >> a=1, b=2, c=dog
# >> 12dog

Validating that all components required for an object to exist are present

I need to write a script that gets a list of components from an external source and based on a pre-defined list it validates whether the service is complete. This is needed because the presence of a single component doesn't automatically imply that the service is present - some components are pre-installed even when there is no service. I've devised something really simple below, but I was wondering what is the intelligent way of doing this? There must be a cleaner, simpler way.
# Components that make up a complete service
serviceComponents = ['A','B']
# Input from JSON
data = ['B','A','C']
serviceComplete = True
for i in serviceComponents:
if i in data:
print 'yay ' + i + ' found from ' + ', '.join(service2)
else:
serviceComplete = False
break
# If serviceComplete = True do blabla...

You could do it a few different ways:
set(serviceComponents) <= set(data)
set(serviceComponents).issubset(data)
all(c in data for c in serviceComponents)
You can make it shorter, but you lose readability. What you have now is probably fine. I'd go with the first approach personally, since it expresses your intent clearly with set operations.

# Components that make up a complete service
serviceComponents = ['A','B']
# Input from JSON
data = ['B','A','C']
if all(item in data for item in serviceComponents):
print("All required components are present")

Built-in Set would serve for you, use set.issubset to identify that your required service components is subset of input data:
serviceComponents = set(['A','B'])
input_data = set(['B','A','C'])
if serviceComponents.issubset(input_data):
# perform actions ...

Why does my association model find subgroups in a dataset when there shouldn't any?

I give a lot of information on the methods that I used to write my code. If you just want to read my question, skip to the quotes at the end.
I'm working on a project that has a goal of detecting sub populations in a group of patients. I thought this sounded like the perfect opportunity to use association rule mining as I'm currently taking a class on the subject.
I there are 42 variables in total. Of those, 20 are continuous and had to be discretized. For each variable, I used the Freedman-Diaconis rule to determine how many categories to divide a group into.
def Freedman_Diaconis(column_values):
#sort the list first
column_values[1].sort()
first_quartile = int(len(column_values[1]) * .25)
third_quartile = int(len(column_values[1]) * .75)
fq_value = column_values[1][first_quartile]
tq_value = column_values[1][third_quartile]
iqr = tq_value - fq_value
n_to_pow = len(column_values[1])**(-1/3)
h = 2 * iqr * n_to_pow
retval = (column_values[1][-1] - column_values[1][1])/h
test = int(retval+1)
return test
From there I used min-max normalization
def min_max_transform(column_of_data, num_bins):
min_max_normalizer = preprocessing.MinMaxScaler(feature_range=(1, num_bins))
data_min_max = min_max_normalizer.fit_transform(column_of_data[1])
data_min_max_ints = take_int(data_min_max)
return data_min_max_ints
to transform my data and then I simply took the interger portion to get the final categorization.
def take_int(list_of_float):
ints = []
for flt in list_of_float:
asint = int(flt)
ints.append(asint)
return ints
I then also wrote a function that I used to combine this value with the variable name.
def string_transform(prefix, column, index):
transformed_list = []
transformed = ""
if index < 4:
for entry in column[1]:
transformed = prefix+str(entry)
transformed_list.append(transformed)
else:
prefix_num = prefix.split('x')
for entry in column[1]:
transformed = str(prefix_num[1])+'x'+str(entry)
transformed_list.append(transformed)
return transformed_list
This was done to differentiate variables that have the same value, but appear in different columns. For example, having a value of 1 for variable x14 means something different from getting a value of 1 in variable x20. The string transform function would create 14x1 and 20x1 for the previously mentioned examples.
After this, I wrote everything to a file in basket format
def create_basket(list_of_lists, headers):
#for filename in os.listdir("."):
# if filename.e
if not os.path.exists('baskets'):
os.makedirs('baskets')
down_length = len(list_of_lists[0])
with open('baskets/dataset.basket', 'w') as basketfile:
basket_writer = csv.DictWriter(basketfile, fieldnames=headers)
for i in range(0, down_length):
basket_writer.writerow({"trt": list_of_lists[0][i], "y": list_of_lists[1][i], "x1": list_of_lists[2][i],
"x2": list_of_lists[3][i], "x3": list_of_lists[4][i], "x4": list_of_lists[5][i],
"x5": list_of_lists[6][i], "x6": list_of_lists[7][i], "x7": list_of_lists[8][i],
"x8": list_of_lists[9][i], "x9": list_of_lists[10][i], "x10": list_of_lists[11][i],
"x11": list_of_lists[12][i], "x12":list_of_lists[13][i], "x13": list_of_lists[14][i],
"x14": list_of_lists[15][i], "x15": list_of_lists[16][i], "x16": list_of_lists[17][i],
"x17": list_of_lists[18][i], "x18": list_of_lists[19][i], "x19": list_of_lists[20][i],
"x20": list_of_lists[21][i], "x21": list_of_lists[22][i], "x22": list_of_lists[23][i],
"x23": list_of_lists[24][i], "x24": list_of_lists[25][i], "x25": list_of_lists[26][i],
"x26": list_of_lists[27][i], "x27": list_of_lists[28][i], "x28": list_of_lists[29][i],
"x29": list_of_lists[30][i], "x30": list_of_lists[31][i], "x31": list_of_lists[32][i],
"x32": list_of_lists[33][i], "x33": list_of_lists[34][i], "x34": list_of_lists[35][i],
"x35": list_of_lists[36][i], "x36": list_of_lists[37][i], "x37": list_of_lists[38][i],
"x38": list_of_lists[39][i], "x39": list_of_lists[40][i], "x40": list_of_lists[41][i]})
and I used the apriori package in Orange to see if there were any association rules.
rules = Orange.associate.AssociationRulesSparseInducer(patient_basket, support=0.3, confidence=0.3)
print "%4s %4s %s" % ("Supp", "Conf", "Rule")
for r in rules:
my_rule = str(r)
split_rule = my_rule.split("->")
if 'trt' in split_rule[1]:
print 'treatment rule'
print "%4.1f %4.1f %s" % (r.support, r.confidence, r)
Using this, technique I found quite a few association rules with my testing data.
THIS IS WHERE I HAVE A PROBLEM
When I read the notes for the training data, there is this note
...That is, the only
reason for the differences among observed responses to the same treatment across patients is
random noise. Hence, there is NO meaningful subgroup for this dataset...
My question is,
why do I get multiple association rules that would imply that there are subgroups, when according to the notes I shouldn't see anything?
I'm getting lift numbers that are above 2 as opposed to the 1 that you should expect if everything was random like the notes state.
Supp Conf Rule
0.3 0.7 6x0 -> trt1
Even though my code runs, I'm not getting results anywhere close to what should be expected. This leads me to believe that I messed something up, but I'm not sure what it is.

After some research, I realized that my sample size is too small for the number of variables that I have. I would need a way larger sample size in order to really use the method that I was using. In fact, the method that I tried to use was developed with the assumption that it would be run on databases with hundreds of thousands or millions of rows.

How to optimize filtering of a layer in QGS API

I'm developping a QGIS plugin (under version 2.8.1) for traffic assignment where I want to show the results of my simulation at each time step. Right now I'm using Time Manager plugin but it gets very slow when my layer has hundreds of thousands of attributes. In my case I know exactly what feature IDs I want to show at each time step so I thought it would be easy to make it faster.
Here is what I tried (sorry of my way of python programming but I'm quite new using this language): at each time step of my loop I set the ordered list of indexes of attributes to show (they are always ordered in my case).
# TEST 1 -----------------------------------
for step in time_steps:
index_start = my_list_of_indexes_start[step]
index_end = my_list_of_indexes_end[step]
expression = 'fid >= ' + str(index_start) + ' AND fid <= ' + str(index_end)
# Or for optimization tests
# expression = '"FIELD_TIME"' + "=" + str(step)
layer_dynamic.setSubsetString(expression)
self.iface.mapCanvas().refresh()
time.sleep(0.2)
# TEST 2 ------------------------------------
for step in time_steps:
index_start = my_list_of_indexes_start[step]
index_end = my_list_of_indexes_end[step]
indexes = list(j for j in range(index_start, index_end))
request = QgsFeatureRequest().setFilterFids(indexes)
layer_dynamic.getFeatures(request)
self.iface.mapCanvas().refresh()
time.sleep(0.2)
Solution 1 with
layer_dynamic.setSubsetString(expression)
works as it refresh the view with the correct filtered features displayed on canvas at each time step but it is even slower than using a SQL expression not based on the indexes but on attributes values (as shown in comment in TEST 1 loop).
Solution 2 with
layer_dynamic.getFeatures(request)
is fast but the display of the layer doesn't change.
Any idea why?

The method
bool QgsVectorLayer.setSubsetString(self, QString subset)
filters the layer (more details in setSubsetString), so only the features that match the filter (provided using a SQL statement or other definition string the the "subset" QString) "will belong to the layer" after it's being filtered. Thus, when you call refresh, only the filtered features are displayed.
On the other hand, the method
QgsFeatureIterator QgsVectorLayer.getFeatures(self, QgsFeatureRequest request=QgsFeatureRequest())
returns a iterator for the features matching you request (more details in getFeatures). It doesn't filter the layer. Using the iterator, you just iterate over the features matching the request.