Multiprocessing with pool in python: About several instances with same name at the same time

Question

I'm kind of new to multiprocessing. However, assume that we have a program as below. The program seems to work fine. Now to the question. In my opinion we will have 4 instances of SomeKindOfClass with the same name (a) at the same time. How is that possible? Moreover, is there a potential risk with this kind of programming?

from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool
import numpy
from theFile import someKindOfClass

n = 8 
allOutputs = numpy.zeros(n)

def work(index):   
    a = SomeKindOfClass()
    a.theSlowFunction()
    allOutputs[index] = a.output

pool = Pool(processes=4) 
pool.map(work,range(0,n))

Answer 1

The name a is only local in scope within your work function, so there is no conflict of names here. Internally python will keep track of each class instance with a unique identifier. If you wanted to check this you could check the object id using the id function:

print(id(a))

I don't see any issues with your code.