Continuum Analytics: Documentation

# Out of Core Processing

Blaze includes nascent support for out-of-core processing with Pandas DataFrames and NumPy NDArrays. It combines a computationally-rich in-memory solution (like pandas/numpy) with a computationally-poor out-of-core solution.

## How do I use this?

Naive use of Blaze triggers out-of-core systems automatically when called on large files.

    >>> d = data('my-small-file.csv')
    >>> d.my_column.count()  # Uses Pandas

    >>> d = data('my-large-file.csv')
    >>> d.my_column.count()  # Uses Chunked Pandas

## How does it work?

Blaze breaks up the data resource into a sequence of chunks. It pulls one chunk into memory, operates on it, pulls in the next, etc.. After all chunks are processed it often has to finalize the computation with another operation on the intermediate results.

In the example above one might accomplish the computation above, counting the number of non-null elements, with pure Pandas as follows:

    # Operate on each chunk
    intermediate = []
    for chunk in pd.read_csv('my-large-file.csv', chunksize=1000000):
        intermediate.append(chunk.my_column.count())

    # Finish computation by operating on the intermediate result
    result = sum(intermediate)

This example accomplishes a single computation on the entire dataset, `d.my_column.count()`, by separating it into two stages

1. compute `chunk.my_column.count()` on each in-memory chunk
2. compute `intermediate.sum()` on the aggregated intermediate results

Blaze figures out this process for you. The code above only serves as an example of the kind of thing that Blaze does automatically. Blaze knows how to separate a broad range of computations. Notable exceptions include joins and sorts. Blaze does not currently support out-of-core computation on joins and sorts.

## Complex Example

To investigate further try out the `split` function in `blaze.expr.split`. It will tell you exactly how Blaze intends to break up your computation. Here is a more complex example doing an out-of-core split-apply-combine operation:

    >>> from blaze import *
    >>> from blaze.expr.split import split

    >>> bank = symbol('bank', 'var * {name: string, balance: int}')

    >>> expr = by(bank.name, avg=bank.balance.mean())

    >>> split(bank, expr)
    ((chunk,
      by(chunk.name, avg_count=count(chunk.balance),
                     avg_total=sum(chunk.balance))),
    (aggregate,
      by(aggregate.name, avg=(sum(aggregate.avg_total)) /
                              sum(aggregate.avg_count))))

As in the first example this chunked split-apply-combine operation translates the intended results into two different computations, one to perform on each in-memory chunk of the data and one to perform on the aggregated results.

Note that you do not need to use `split` yourself. Blaze does this for you automatically.

## Parallel Processing

If a data source is easily separable into chunks in a parallel manner then computation may be accelerated by a parallel map function provided by the `multiprocessing` module (or any similar module).

For example a dataset comprised of many CSV files may be easily split up (one csv file = one chunk.) To supply a parallel map function one currently must use the explicit `compute` function.

    >>> d = data('my-many-csv-files-*.csv')
    >>> d.my_column.count()  # Single core by default
    ...

    >>> import multiprocessing
    >>> pool = multiprocessing.Pool(4)  # Four processes

    >>> compute(d.my_column.count(), map=pool.map)  # Parallel over four cores
    ...

Note that one can only parallelize over datasets that can be easily split in a non-serial fashion. In particular one can not parallelize computation over a single CSV file. Collections of CSV files and binary storage systems like HDF5 and BColz all support multiprocessing.

## Beyond CSVs

While pervasive, CSV files may not be the best choice for speedy processing. Binary storage formats like HDF5 and BColz provide more opportunities for parallelism and are generally much faster for large datasets.