# Tips for optimising parallel numba code

You can get and set the number of threads used for parallel execution using the numba.get_num_threads and numba.set_num_threads functions.

numba.get_num_threads()
8
numba.set_num_threads(2)
numba.get_num_threads()
2

numba defaults to having one thread per processor core on your computer. This may be too high if, e.g. you have hyperthreading enabled (so have two or more hypercores per physical core) or if your computer has a mix of fast and slow cores (e.g. I have an M1, which has 4 fast cores and 4 slow / efficiency cores).

In general, you should profile your code (test the speed for different numbers of threads) and set the number of threads equal to the number that give the best efficiency for your calculation. You could do this at runtime by optimising on, e.g. 1% of your data set, and then using the optimum number of threads to process the remaining 99% of the data set.

## Reduction

Threading only works if each thread is able to process data independently. This means that threads can be executed out of order, and that they won’t be trying to update the same variables, or same place in memory.

There are lots of situations where you do want your threads to update the same variable. For example, you may be calculating a running total sum over all iterations of the loop. This is an example of a reduction.

Normally, when parallel programming, you would have to manually recognise when you are performing a reduction, and then add in directives or special code to mark the reduction operation (e.g. the sum, when calculating a running total).

numba is clever and will automatically work out when you are performing a reduction, and will automatically add those directives and special code for you when it jit-compiles your function. Any operation that is a +=, -= or *= will automatically be treated as a reduction, if it involves numeric data. This means that code like this;

@numba.jit(parallel=True)
def reduction(numbers):
total = 0

for i in numba.prange(0, len(numbers)):
total += numbers[i]

return total

will correctly compile and run.

numbers = np.array(range(1, 10001))

reduction(numbers) == np.sum(numbers)
True

The resulting code is competitive with numpy’s built-in sum funtion;

timeit(reduction(numbers))
5.02 µs ± 3.13 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100,000 loops each)
timeit(np.sum(numbers))
5.21 µs ± 2.36 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100,000 loops each)

There are times where you need more control over writing to shared variables than could be achived by using reductions. For these cases, you need to use variables that are “private” to each thread - so-called thread-local storage.

There is no direct support for thread-local storage in Python or numba. You can achieve a similar effect by refactoring your loop so that there is one iteration per thread. This way, data used per iteration (which is local, or private to that thread) is also local and private to the thread.

You can then accumulate data into an array. This array should be sized to have the same number of values as there are threads. Each thread only updates the value at its own index in the array. You can then aggregate data after the parallel loop by iterating over this “thread-local” data array. For example, we could have rewritten the above reduction as a thread-local storage via;

@numba.jit(parallel=True)
def reduction(numbers):
total = 0

total = np.zeros(nthreads, np.int32)

num_vals = len(numbers)

n_per_thread = int(num_vals / nthreads) + 1

for i in numba.prange(0, nthreads):
start = i * n_per_thread
end = min((i+1) * n_per_thread, num_vals)

for j in range(start, end):

global_total = 0

for i in range(0, nthreads):
global_total += total[i]

return global_total
numbers = np.array(range(1, 10001))

reduction(numbers) == np.sum(numbers)
True

This route is slower than using a reduction. But it is necessary for more complex code.

timeit(reduction(numbers))
6.33 µs ± 2.47 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100,000 loops each)

For example, we would need to use this approach to parallelise the get_index_of_best_score function in slow.py;

@numba.jit(parallel=True)
def get_index_of_best_score(scores):
"""Return the index of the best score from the passed list of scores"""

# Now find the pattern with the highest score

best_score = np.zeros(num_threads, np.int32)
best_pattern = np.zeros(num_threads, np.int32)

num_rows = len(scores)
n_per_thread = int(num_rows / num_threads) + 1

for i in range(0, num_threads):
start = i * n_per_thread
end = min((i+1)*n_per_thread, num_rows)

local_best_score = 0
local_best_pattern = 0

for irow in range(start, end):
if scores[irow] > local_best_score:
local_best_pattern = irow
local_best_score = scores[irow]

best_score[i] = local_best_score
best_pattern[i] = local_best_pattern

global_best_score = best_score[0]
global_best_pattern = best_pattern[0]

for i in range(1, num_threads):
if best_score[i] > global_best_score:
global_best_score = best_score[i]
global_best_pattern = best_pattern[i]

return global_best_pattern