Multiprocessing: How to use Pool.map on a function defined in a class?

Question

When I run something like:

from multiprocessing import Pool

p = Pool(5)
def f(x):
     return x*x

p.map(f, [1,2,3])

it works fine. However, putting this as a function of a class:

class calculate(object):
    def run(self):
        def f(x):
            return x*x

        p = Pool()
        return p.map(f, [1,2,3])

cl = calculate()
print cl.run()

Gives me the following error:

Exception in thread Thread-1:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/sw/lib/python2.6/threading.py", line 532, in __bootstrap_inner
    self.run()
  File "/sw/lib/python2.6/threading.py", line 484, in run
    self.__target(*self.__args, **self.__kwargs)
  File "/sw/lib/python2.6/multiprocessing/pool.py", line 225, in _handle_tasks
    put(task)
PicklingError: Can't pickle <type 'function'>: attribute lookup __builtin__.function failed

I've seen a post from Alex Martelli dealing with the same kind of problem, but it wasn't explicit enough.

Answer 1

I could not use the codes posted so far because the codes using "multiprocessing.Pool" do not work with lambda expressions and the codes not using "multiprocessing.Pool" spawn as many processes as there are work items.

I adapted the code s.t. it spawns a predefined amount of workers and only iterates through the input list if there exists an idle worker. I also enabled the "daemon" mode for the workers s.t. ctrl-c works as expected.

import multiprocessing


def fun(f, q_in, q_out):
    while True:
        i, x = q_in.get()
        if i is None:
            break
        q_out.put((i, f(x)))


def parmap(f, X, nprocs=multiprocessing.cpu_count()):
    q_in = multiprocessing.Queue(1)
    q_out = multiprocessing.Queue()

    proc = [multiprocessing.Process(target=fun, args=(f, q_in, q_out))
            for _ in range(nprocs)]
    for p in proc:
        p.daemon = True
        p.start()

    sent = [q_in.put((i, x)) for i, x in enumerate(X)]
    [q_in.put((None, None)) for _ in range(nprocs)]
    res = [q_out.get() for _ in range(len(sent))]

    [p.join() for p in proc]

    return [x for i, x in sorted(res)]


if __name__ == '__main__':
    print(parmap(lambda i: i * 2, [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8]))

Answer 2

I also was annoyed by restrictions on what sort of functions pool.map could accept. I wrote the following to circumvent this. It appears to work, even for recursive use of parmap.

from multiprocessing import Process, Pipe
from itertools import izip

def spawn(f):
    def fun(pipe, x):
        pipe.send(f(x))
        pipe.close()
    return fun

def parmap(f, X):
    pipe = [Pipe() for x in X]
    proc = [Process(target=spawn(f), args=(c, x)) for x, (p, c) in izip(X, pipe)]
    [p.start() for p in proc]
    [p.join() for p in proc]
    return [p.recv() for (p, c) in pipe]

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print parmap(lambda x: x**x, range(1, 5))