What does the delayed() function do (when used with joblib in Python)

Question

I've read through the documentation, but I don't understand what is meant by: The delayed function is a simple trick to be able to create a tuple (function, args, kwargs) with a function-call syntax.

I'm using it to iterate over the list I want to operate on (allImages) as follows:

def joblib_loop():
    Parallel(n_jobs=8)(delayed(getHog)(i) for i in allImages)

This returns my HOG features, like I want (and with the speed gain using all my 8 cores), but I'm just not sure what it is actually doing.

My Python knowledge is alright at best, and it's very possible that I'm missing something basic. Any pointers in the right direction would be most appreciated

Answer 1

Perhaps things become clearer if we look at what would happen if instead we simply wrote

Parallel(n_jobs=8)(getHog(i) for i in allImages)

which, in this context, could be expressed more naturally as:

1. Create a Pararell instance with n_jobs=8
2. create the list [getHog(i) for i in allImages]
3. pass that list to the Parallel instance

What's the problem? By the time the list gets passed to the Pararell object, all getHog(i) calls have already returned - so there's nothing left to execute in Parallel! All the work was already done in the main thread, sequentially.

What we actually want is to tell Python what functions we want to call with what arguments, without actually calling them - in other words, we want to delay the execution.

This is what delayed conveniently allows us to do, with clear syntax. If we want to tell Python that we'd like to call foo(2, g=3) sometime later, we can simply write delayed(foo)(2, g=3). Returned is the tuple (foo, [2], {g: 3}), containing:

• a reference to the function we want to call, e.g.foo
• all arguments (short "args") without a keyword, e.g.t 2
• all keyword arguments (short "kwargs"), e.g. g=3

So, by writing Parallel(n_jobs=8)(delayed(getHog)(i) for i in allImages), instead of the above sequence, now the following happens:

1. A Pararell instance with n_jobs=8 gets created

2. The list

   [delayed(getHog)(i) for i in allImages]
   

   gets created, evaluating to

   [(getHog, [img1], {}), (getHog, [img2], {}), ... ]
   

3. That list is passed to the Parallel instance

4. The Parallel instance creates 8 threads and distributes the tuples from the list to them

5. Finally, each of those threads starts executing the tuples, i.e., they call the first element with the second and the third elements unpacked as arguments tup[0](*tup[1], **tup[2]), turning the tuple back into the call we actually intended to do, getHog(img2).