Book Image

Python Parallel Programming Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Giancarlo Zaccone
Book Image

Python Parallel Programming Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Giancarlo Zaccone

Overview of this book

<p>Nowadays, it has become extremely important for programmers to understand the link between the software and the parallel nature of their hardware so that their programs run efficiently on computer architectures. Applications based on parallel programming are fast, robust, and easily scalable. </p><p> </p><p>This updated edition features cutting-edge techniques for building effective concurrent applications in Python 3.7. The book introduces parallel programming architectures and covers the fundamental recipes for thread-based and process-based parallelism. You'll learn about mutex, semaphores, locks, queues exploiting the threading, and multiprocessing modules, all of which are basic tools to build parallel applications. Recipes on MPI programming will help you to synchronize processes using the fundamental message passing techniques with mpi4py. Furthermore, you'll get to grips with asynchronous programming and how to use the power of the GPU with PyCUDA and PyOpenCL frameworks. Finally, you'll explore how to design distributed computing systems with Celery and architect Python apps on the cloud using PythonAnywhere, Docker, and serverless applications. </p><p> </p><p>By the end of this book, you will be confident in building concurrent and high-performing applications in Python.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication

Thread synchronization with semaphores

A semaphore is an abstract data type managed by the OS to synchronize access by multiple threads to shared resources and data. It consists of an internal variable that identifies the amount of concurrent access to a resource with which it is associated.

Getting ready

The operation of a semaphore is based on two functions: acquire() and release(), as explained here:

  • Whenever a thread wants to access a given or a resource that is associated with a semaphore, it must invoke the acquire() operation, which decreases the internal variable of the semaphore and allows access to the resource if the value of this variable appears to be non-negative. If the value is negative, then the thread will be suspended...