3. pyopus.parallel — Parallel processing support

Parallel computation support module

In PyOPUS a parallel execution environment is abstracted in form of a virtual machine. Virtual machines are composed of hosts which run tasks. Tasks communicate with each other using basic virtual machine communication facilities. A message is an abstraction of one of these facilities which provides sending and receiving data between two hosts.

Messages are used at higher levels of abstraction. See the pyopus.parallel.cooperative module which is a cooperative multitasking OS capable of dispatching jobs to available computing nodes. It can run a parallel algorithms locally or on a virtual machine via e.g. MPI. Parallel algorithms are described in a UNIX-like manner with spawn/join system calls. The OS also provides a simple asynchronous job dispatching facility.

Nothing from this module’s submodules is imported into the main parallel module.