## Parallelising Machine Learning in Python

About 3 years back when I got my first job in Machine Learning I would run most of my analysis on a 32 cores machine. 32 cores are perfect for running things in parallel… so I thought. But then I learned about GIL. Basically, Python, despite being one of the most popular languages for data science, is “broken” when it comes to multithreading: cpu-bound threads can only use one core at a time.

This leads to certain embarrassingly parallelisable code to execute sequentially. In this blog post I want to compute a sum of each column in a large numpy array. An obvious way to parallelise this is to compute the sum for each column in parallel and then aggregate the result. How can this be achieved?

## “Hack”: multiprocessing

Instead of using threads we fork the main process. The main disadvantage of this method is that each process should receive a copy of you data. So if we are operating on a 20gb dataframe, a naive execution of 32 processes will end up consuming 640gb of memory. This, of course, will result in MemoryError in cases when it’s worth parallelising in the first place. However, it turns out that Linux uses copy-on-write mechanism when creating new processes. This means that we can share memory between processes as long as we don’t modify the underlying dataframe. In practice I found that storing a numpy array in a global variable (a list or a dict) and then starting processes allows me to utilise all cores and still write code in pure Python, see example below:

This works, but the overhead of setting up all the processes often kills the performance gain. Moreover, in my experience I found the copy-on-write mechanism not very reliable: certain aggregate operations that should be read-only would sometimes trigger Linux to make copies. Nevertheless this methods has served me well and it is a good starting point.

Let’s see some timings. First let’s create a random numpy array and convert it to Fortran-contiguous, i.e. make it so that columns are stored next to one another:

See this answer on StackOverflow if you are not sure why the conversion. Finally, let’s time the execution:

So our execution is slower than a simple sum performed by numpy (which is single-threaded, according to htop anyway) and that is despite the fact that sum_multiprocessing utilises all 4 of my cores. One advantage of the code above is that it could work just as well with Pandas’ dataframes just fine, as everything is done in pure python.

## Another approach: Cython

Let’s see if we can actually beat numpy’s np.sum(). Since the above is a bit of a hack and only works on Linux, how do libraries like scikit-learn utilise all cores? They use Cython which allows one to write multithreaded code without worrying about the GIL. Cython also has a good way to interact with numpy arrays. Without further ado, lets jump into the code and the result:

OK, looks like my Cython multithreaded implementation is somewhat faster. First of all, why is np.sum so difficult to beat? I strongly suspect it’s using vector instructions.

Now some comments on the code. My original version of cdef double sum_col was just

But this won’t compile. The error is: Accessing Python attribute not allowed without gil. Looks like the result of np.sum() is a numpy array, which is a python object. But we can’t construct a python object without the GIL as cython can’t talk to the python interpreter. This means that Cython is quite limited: I have to reimplement even the basics in order to benefit from multithreading. For exact same reason I can’t just have

because res is a python object. Luckily Cython allows one to access numpy arrays by having memoryviews, see res_view above. Further comments on the code:

lines just speed up the execution by making the code less safe, I only added those once I had a working implementation. Note as well that the code can’t easily be generalised to Pandas’ dataframes as they are python objects.

# Conclusion

Whilst Cython provides a way for machine learning practitioners to utilise all cores, it requires writing a lot of code from scratch and converting dataframes to numpy arrays. Perhaps such complexity is only warranted once you already know very well what you want to compute. If you are still investigating, multiprocessing sounds like a better approach.

So, natural question occurs, why use Python at all? Why don’t I switch to a language that is much more adapted for multithreading? The truth is I don’t have to parallelise things that often: I can often get away with subsampling data instead and running my experiments only on a small part of the data. In the end, the answer must be that I prefer leveraging a well-established machine learning infrastructure that Python has over using something more obscure, even if it is better.