TDM 30200: Project 2 — 2023

In the previous project, I gave you the following scenario.

In this asynchronous example, the author could start with the first sharpened pencil and write 1/2 of the report in 5 seconds. Next, hand the first pencil off to the assistant to help sharpen it. While that is happening, use the second pencil to write the second half of the first report. Next, receive the first (now sharpened) pencil back from the assistant and hand the second pencil to the assistant to be sharpened. While the assistant was sharpening the second pencil, you would write the first half of the second report. The assistant would return the (now sharpened) second pencil back to you to finish the second report. This process would (in theory) take 20 seconds as the assistant would be sharpening pencils at the same time you are writing the report. As an effect, you could exclude the 4 seconds it takes to sharpen both pencils once, from our synchronous solution of 24 seconds.

In this project we will examine how to write asynchronous code that simulates the scenario, in a variety of ways that will teach you how to write asynchronous code. At the end of the project, you will write your own asynchronous code that will speed up a web scraping task. Let’s get started!

Fill in the skeleton code below to simulate the scenario. Use only the provided functions, sharpen_pencil, and write_half_report, and the await keyword.

Run the simulation in a new cell as follows.

How long does you code take to run? Does it take the expected 20 seconds? If you have an idea why or why not, please try to explain. Otherwise, just say "I don’t know".

If you don’t have any experience writing asynchronous code, this might be pretty confusing! That’s okay, it is much easier to get confused writing asynchronous code than it is to write synchronous code. In fact, it is safe to say that writing good parallel and/or asynchronous code is significantly more difficult than writing non async/parallel code.

Let’s break it down. First, the asyncio.run function takes care of the bulk of the work. It starts the event loop, finalizes asynchronous generators, and closes the threadpool. All you need to take from it is "it takes care of a lot of ugly magic".

Any function that starts with async is an asynchronous function. Calling an async function produces a coroutine, nearly instantly. A coroutine is a function that has the ability to have its progress be paused and resumed at will.

For example, if you called the following async function, it will not execute, but rather it will just create a coroutine object.

This result should be shown nearly instantly, the sleep code hasn’t actually been run! In fact, if your async code runs way faster than expected, this may be a sign that you’ve forgotten to await a coroutine. Don’t worry too much about that for now.

To actually run the coroutine, you need to call the asyncio.run function.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to call asyncio.run for each and every coroutine you create. It makes more sense to spin up the event loop once and handle the processes while it is running.

Run the code, what is the output?

Let’s take a step back. Why is asynchronous code useful? What do our asyncio.sleep calls represent? One of the slowest parts of a program is waiting for I/O or input/output. It takes time to wait for the operating system and hardware. If you are doing a lot of I/O in your program, you could take advantage and perform other operations while waiting! In our example, this is what the asyncio.sleep calls represent — I/O!

Any program where the IO speed limits the speed of the program is called I/O Bound. Any program where the program speed is limited by how fast the CPU can process the instructions is called CPU Bound. Async programming can drastically speed up I/O Bound software!

Okay, back to the code from above. What is the output? You may have expected foo to run, then, while foo is "doing some IO (sleeping)", bar will run. Then, in a total of 5 seconds, you may have expected "World Hello" to be printed. While the foo is sleeping, bar runs, gets done in 2 seconds, goes back to foo and finishes in another 3 seconds, right? Nope.

What happens is that when we await for foo, Python suspends the execution of main until foo is done. Then it resumes execution of main and suspends it again until bar is done for an approximate time of 7 seconds. We want both coroutines to run concurrently, not one at a time! How do we fix it? The easiest would be to use asyncio.gather.

asyncio.gather takes a list of awaitable objects (coroutines are awaitable objects) and runs them concurrently by scheduling them as a task. Running the code above should work as expected, and run in approximately 5 seconds. We gain 2 seconds in performance since both foo and bar run concurrently. While foo is sleeping, bar is running and completes. We gain 2 seconds while those functions overlap.

What is a task? You can read about tasks here. A task is an object that runs a coroutine. The easiest way to create a task is to use the asyncio.create_task method. For example, if instead of awaiting both foo and bar, we scheduled foo as a task, you would get mostly the same result as if you used asyncio.gather.

As you can see, "World" prints in a couple of seconds, and 3 seconds later "Hello" prints, for a total execution time of 5 seconds. With that being said, something is odd with our output.

It says that it executed in 2 seconds, not 5. In addition, "Hello" prints after Jupyter says our execution completed. Why? Well, if you read here, you will see that asyncio.create_task takes a coroutine (in our case the output from foo()), and schedules it as a task in the event loop returned by asyncio.get_running_loop(). This is the critical part — it is scheduling the coroutine created by foo() to run on the same event loop that Jupyter Lab is running on, so even though our event loop created by asyncio.run stopped execution, foo ran until complete instead of cancelling as soon as bar was awaited! To observe this, open a terminal and run the following code to launch a Python interpreter:

Then, in the Python interpreter, run the following.

As you can see, the output is not the same as when you run it from within the Jupyter notebook. Instead of:

You should get:

This is because this time, there is no confusion on which event loop to use when scheduling a task. Once we reach the end of main, the event loop is stopped and any tasks scheduled are terminated — even if they haven’t finished (like foo, in our example). If you wanted to modify main in order to wait for foo to complete, you could await the task after you await bar().

In the same way that asyncio.create_task schedules the coroutines as tasks on the event loop (immediately), so does asyncio.gather. In a previous example, we awaited our call to asyncio.gather.

This is critical, otherwise, main would execute immediately and terminate before either foo or bar finished.

As you can see, since we did not await our asyncio.gather call, main ran and finished immediately. The only reason "World" and "Hello" printed is that they finished running on the event loop that Jupyter uses instead of the loop we created using our call to asyncio.run. If you were to run the code from a Python interpreter instead of from Jupyter Lab, neither "World" nor "Hello" would print.

Modify your simulate_story function from question (1) so that sharpen_pencil runs concurrently with write_quarter, and the total execution time is about 20 seconds.

That last question was quite a bit to take in! It is ok if it hasn’t all clicked! I’d encourage you to post questions in Piazza, and continue to mess around with simple async examples until it makes more sense. It will help us explain things better and improve things for the next group of students!

There are a couple of straightforward ways you could solve the previous question (well technically there are even more). One way involves queuing up the sharpen_pencil coroutines as tasks that run concurrently, and awaiting them at the end. The other involves using asyncio.gather to queue up select write_quarter and sharpen_pencil tasks to run concurrently, and await them.

While both of these methods do a great job simulating our simple story, there may be instances where a greater amount of control may be needed. In such circumstances, the Python synchronization primitives may be useful!

Read about the Event primitive, in particular. This primitive allows us to notify one or more async tasks that something has happened. This is particularly useful if you want some async code to wait for other async code to run before continuing on. Cool, how does it work? Let’s say I want to yell, but before I yell, I want the megaphone to be ready.

First, create an event, that represents some event.

To wait to continue until the event has occurred, you just need to await the coroutine created by calling my_event.wait(). So in our case, we can add my_event.wait() before we yell in the yell function.

By default, our Event is set to False since the event has not occurred. The yell task will continue to await our event until the event is marked as set. To mark our event as set, we would use the set method.

Consider each of the following as a separate event:

Use the Event primitive to make our code run as intended, concurrently. Use the following code as a skeleton for your solution. Do not modify the code, just make additions.

While it is certainly useful to have some experience with async programming in Python, the context in which most data scientists will deal with it is writing APIs using something like fastapi, where a deep knowledge of async programming isn’t really needed.

What will be pretty common is the need to speed up code. One of the primary ways to do that is to parallelize your code.

In the previous project, in question (5), you described an operation that you could do to the entire flights dataset (/anvil/projects/tdm/data/flights/subset). In this situation, where you have a collection of neatly formatted datasets, a good first step would be to write a function that accepts a two paths as arguments. The first path could be the absolute path to the dataset to be processed. The second path could be the absolute path of the intermediate output file. Then, the function could process the dataset and output the intermediate calculations.

For example, let’s say you wanted to count how many flights in the dataset as a whole. Then, you could write a function to read in the dataset, count the flights, and output a file containing the number of flights. This would be easily parallelizable because you could process each of the files individually, in parallel, and at the very end, sum up the data in the output file.

Write a function that is "ready" to be parallelized, and that follows the operation you described in question (5) in the previous project. Test out the function on at least 2 of the datasets in /anvil/projects/tdm/data/flights/subset.