Why does multiprocessing use only a single core after I import numpy?

Question

After some more googling I found the answer here.

It turns out that certain Python modules (numpy, scipy, tables, pandas, skimage...) mess with core affinity on import. As far as I can tell, this problem seems to be specifically caused by them linking against multithreaded OpenBLAS libraries.

A workaround is to reset the task affinity using

os.system("taskset -p 0xff %d" % os.getpid())

With this line pasted in after the module imports, my example now runs on all cores:

My experience so far has been that this doesn't seem to have any negative effect on numpy's performance, although this is probably machine- and task-specific .

Update:

There are also two ways to disable the CPU affinity-resetting behaviour of OpenBLAS itself. At run-time you can use the environment variable OPENBLAS_MAIN_FREE (or GOTOBLAS_MAIN_FREE), for example

OPENBLAS_MAIN_FREE=1 python myscript.py

Or alternatively, if you're compiling OpenBLAS from source you can permanently disable it at build-time by editing the Makefile.rule to contain the line

NO_AFFINITY=1

Python 3 now exposes the methods to directly set the affinity

>>> import os
>>> os.sched_getaffinity(0)
{0, 1, 2, 3}
>>> os.sched_setaffinity(0, {1, 3})
>>> os.sched_getaffinity(0)
{1, 3}
>>> x = {i for i in range(10)}
>>> x
{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}
>>> os.sched_setaffinity(0, x)
>>> os.sched_getaffinity(0)
{0, 1, 2, 3}

This appears to be a common problem with Python on Ubuntu, and is not specific to joblib:

• Both multiprocessing.map and joblib use only 1 cpu after upgrade from Ubuntu 10.10 to 12.04
• Python multiprocessing utilizes only one core
• multiprocessing.Pool processes locked to a single core

I would suggest experimenting with CPU affinity (taskset).