Dask is a flexible, open source, parallel computing library for analytic computing. It takes a Python job and shares it across multiple systems.
It’s main virtue is that if you are familiar with Python’s syntax, you’re ready to use Dask.
Dask consists of two components:
- Dynamic task scheduling optimized for computation. This is similar to Airflow, Luigi, Celery, or Make, but optimized for interactive computational workloads.
- “Big Data” collections like parallel arrays, dataframes, and lists that extend common interfaces like NumPy, Pandas, or Python iterators to larger-than-memory or distributed environments. These parallel collections run on top of the dynamic task schedulers.
It offers three main interfaces for many popular machine learning and scientific-computing libraries in Python:
- Array, which works like NumPy arrays.
- Bag, which is akin to the RDD interface in Spark. Dask.Bag parallelizes computations across a large collection of generic Python objects.
- DataFrame, which works like Pandas DataFrame.
Key Features
- Provides parallelized NumPy array and Pandas DataFrame objects.
- Scale Pandas, scikit-learn, and NumPy workflows with minimal rewriting.
- Provides a task scheduling interface for more custom workloads and integration with other projects.
- Enables distributed computing in pure Python with access to the PyData stack.
- Operates with low overhead, low latency, and minimal serialization necessary for fast numerical algorithms.
- Runs resiliently on clusters with thousands of cores.
- Supports encryption and authentication using TLS/SSL certificates.
- Resilient – can handle the failure of worker nodes gracefully and is elastic.
- Scales down – easy to set up and run on a laptop in a single process. This is useful if you need to manipulate some datasets without needing to use a cluster.
- Responsive – designed with interactive computing in mind it provides rapid feedback and diagnostics to aid humans.
- Diagnostic and investigative tools:
- Real-time and responsive dashboard that shows current progress, communication costs, memory use, and more, updated every 100ms.
- A statistical profiler installed on every worker that polls each thread every 10ms to determine which lines in your code are taking up the most time across your entire computation.
- An embedded IPython kernel in every worker and the scheduler, allowing users to directly investigate the state of their computation with a pop-up terminal
- The ability to re-raise errors locally, so that they can use the traditional debugging tools to which they are accustomed, even when the error happens remotely.
- Several user APIs.
Website: dask.org
Support: Documentation, GitHub
Developer: Dask core developers
License: New BSD License
Dask is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Python Data Analysis | |
|---|---|
| pandas | High-level building block for doing practical, real world data analysis |
| NumPy | Core package for scientific computing with Python |
| SciPy | Ecosystem for mathematics, science, and engineering |
| Polars | DataFrame interface on top of an OLAP Query Engine |
| statsmodels | Statistical modeling and econometrics in Python |
| Dask | Advanced parallelism for analytics |
| Orange | Component-based framework for machine learning and data mining |
| Modin | Drop-in replacement for pandas |
| Vaex | Fast visualization of big data |
| AWS DW | Extends the power of pandas library |
| yt | Multi-code Toolkit for Analyzing and Visualizing Volumetric Data |
| HoloViews | Make Data Analysis and Visualization Seamless |
| datatable | Manipulate 2-dimensional tabular data structures |
| xarray | Work with labelled multi-dimensional arrays and datasets |
| pyjanitor | Extend pandas with readable data-cleaning functions |
| Optimus | Agile Data Preparation Workflows |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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