14. Advanced Parallelism Topics¶

This section discusses parallelism topics that may be useful for performance tuning and advanced use cases.

14.1. Getting/Setting Distributed Data Directly¶

Distributed data is usually accessed and modified through high-level Pandas and Numpy APIs. However, Bodo allows direct access to distributed data without code modification in many cases as well. Here are the cases that are currently supported:

Getting values using boolean array indexing, e.g. B = A[A > 3]. The output can be distributed, but may be imbalanced (bodo.rebalance() can be used if necessary).
Getting values using a slice, e.g. B = A[::2]. The output can be distributed, but may be imbalanced (bodo.rebalance() can be used if necessary).
Getting a value using a scalar index, e.g. a = A[m]. The output can be replicated.
Setting values using boolean array indexing, e.g. A[A > 3] = a. Only supports setting a scalar or lower-dimension value currently.
Setting values using a slice, e.g. A[::2] = a. Only supports setting a scalar or lower-dimension value currently.
Setting a value using a scalar index, e.g. A[m] = a.

14.2. Concatenation Reduction¶

Some algorithms require generating variable-length output data per input data element. Bodo supports parallelizing this pattern, which we refer to as concatenation reduction. For example:

@bodo.jit
def impl(n):
   df = pd.DataFrame()
   for i in bodo.prange(n):
      df = df.append(pd.DataFrame({"A": np.arange(i)}))

   return df

A common use case is simulation applications that generate possible outcomes based on parameters. For example:

@bodo.jit
def impl():
   params = np.array([0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, ..., 100])
   params = bodo.scatterv(params)
   df = pd.DataFrame()
   for i in bodo.prange(len(params)):
      df = df.append(get_result(params[i]))

   return df

In this example, we chose to manually parallelize the parameter array for simplicity, since the workload is compute-heavy and the parameter data is relatively small.

14.3. Load Balancing Distributed Data¶

Some computations such as filter, join or groupby can result in imbalanced data chunks across cores for distributed data. This may result in some cores operating on nearly empty dataframes, and others on relatively large ones.

Bodo provides bodo.rebalance to allow manual load balance if necessary. For example:

@bodo.jit(distributed={"df"})
def rebalance_example(df):
    df = df[df["A"] > 3]
    df = bodo.rebalance(df)
    return df.sum()

In this case, we use bodo.rebalance to make sure the filtered dataframe has near-equal data chunk sizes across cores, which would accelerate later computations (sum in this case).

We can also use the dests keyword to specify a subset of ranks to which bodo should distribute the data from all ranks.

Example usage:

@bodo.jit(distributed={"df"})
def rebalance_example(df):
    df = df[df["A"] > 3]
    df = bodo.rebalance(df, dests=[0, 1])
    return df.sum()