Composable Multi-Threading for Python Libraries

Abstract

Python is popular among numeric communities that value it for easy to use number crunching modules like [NumPy], [SciPy], [Dask], [Numba], and many others. These modules often use multi-threading for efficient multi-core parallelism in order to utilize all the available CPU cores. Nevertheless, their threads can interfere with each other leading to overhead and inefficiency if used together in one application. The loss of performance can be prevented if all the multi-threaded parties are coordinated. This paper describes usage of Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB), an open-source cross-platform library for multi-core parallelism [TBB], as the composability layer for Python modules. It helps to unlock additional performance for numeric applications on multi-core systems.