Dask Tutorial

In this tutorial you will learn the basics of Dask, specifically the following:

1. How to parallelize simple for-loop code with Dask Futures
2. How to scale up Pandas code with Dask Dataframes

Additionally you will work on real large scale data using a cluster of machines on the cloud

Set up

1. Clone this repository

   In your terminal:

   git clone https://github.com/mrocklin/dask-tutorial
   cd dask-tutorial
   

   Alternatively, you can download the zip file of the repository at the top of the main page of the repository. This is a good option if you don't have experience with git.

2. Create Conda Environment

   In your terminal navigate to the directory where you have cloned/downloaded the dask-tutorial repository and install the required packages:

   conda env create -f binder/environment.yml
   

   This will create a new environment called dask-tutorial. To activate the environment do:

   conda activate dask-tutorial
   

   Alternatively, you can run pip install -r requirements.txt. This may or may not work as well. We recommend doing this from a fresh Python environment (this will make synchronizing with your cluster easier).

3. Establish Coiled Access

   This tutorial will use Dask clusters on the cloud. We will get these clusters using a SaaS product, Coiled. You can either ...

   1. Sign up (it's free and there's no commitment) as follows:

      coiled login
      

      You'll be asked to authenticate with GitHub to make an account. Don't worry about connecting to your cloud resources. We'll add you to the dask-tutorials team, which is connected to an AWS account of ours.

      To get this access, ask to be added in the #dask-tutorial channel. You'll also want to set your default account to dask-tutorials:

      coiled config set account dask-tutorials
      

      Alternatively, you can also ...

   2. Use a short-lived auth token

      coiled login --token 65924ef194cc4b658ff37c1c11caa357-2ad71e4ceeafd5a771f553306cff95eb9624ee2d --account dask-tutorials
      

      This should just work, but will expire in a few days and you won't be able to access the web view.

4. Open Jupyter Lab

   Once your environment has been activated and you are in the dask-tutorial repository, start Jupyter Lab:

   jupyter lab
   

   You will see a notebooks directory, click on there and you will be ready to go.

   We recommend Jupyter Lab due to the Dask Jupyter extension.

Run on a Coiled notebook

1. Setup virtual environment

   conda create -n dask-tutorial python=3.10 coiled jupyter
   conda activate dask-tutorial
   

2. Establish Coiled Access

   1. Sign up (it's free and there's no commitment) as follows:

      coiled login
      

      You'll be asked to authenticate with GitHub to make an account. Don't worry about connecting to your cloud resources. We'll add you to the dask-tutorials team, which is connected to an AWS account of ours.

      To get this access, ask to be added in the #dask-tutorial channel. You'll also want to set your default account to dask-tutorials:

      coiled config set account dask-tutorials
      

      Alternatively, you can also ...

   2. Use a short-lived auth token

      coiled login --token 65924ef194cc4b658ff37c1c11caa357-2ad71e4ceeafd5a771f553306cff95eb9624ee2d --account dask-tutorials
      

      This should just work, but will expire in a few days and you won't be able to access the web view.

3. Start Coiled notebook

   coiled notebook up --software jupytercon-notebook
   

   Note: Don't forget to shut down your notebook after you're done!

Run on mybinder.org

The website mybinder.org serves pre-configured Jupyter notebooks for free that you can also use. Here is the link → .

However, mybinder.org has tragically lost some of their funding recently, and so availability is not what it once was. We recommend running locally if possible.