Lazy evaluation

[bgrant]

Based on #580.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_future#Promise_pipelining

For example:

withcontext.lazy_eval():
a=context.zeros((52, 62))
b=context.ones((52, 62))
c=context.ones((52, 62)) +1d= (2*a+ (3*b+4*c)) /2e=globalapi.negative(d*d)

Our implementation

On the client, when <context>.lazy == True:

• Sends are intercepted and queued (in <context>._sendq)
• Recvs return immediately, queueing a lazy placeholder object inside a returned proxy object
• When <context>.sync() is called, the both queues are sent to the engines (one queue per engine actually), and a real recv is blocked upon.

On the engines, when a 'process_message_queue' message is received (containing the queues):

• Each message in the sendq is processed, one at a time, and the placeholder values from the recvq are used to feed values forward into the engine-side computation
• Client-sends (return values) are queued, and sent as one message once the queue is processed.

On the client:

• The client iterates through this return queue, and the lazy placeholders inside the originally reserved proxies are replaced by the real return values.

A note on my names

There's a Context attribute called lazy, and a Context method called lazy_eval() that is a context manager (decorated by contextlib.contextmanager) that sets and unsets lazy under the hood. If you have better ideas for those names, let me know.

Benchmark

I also added a simple benchmark in examples/lazy_eval. I time a loop that computes tanh on a DistArray for a settable number of iterations, both in lazy mode or in the default eager mode. Lazy mode seems to beat eager, but it's not as dramatic as I would have expected. I should probably think through the benchmark more.

[bgrant]

This is ready for a look @kwmsmith.

[kwmsmith]

Closes #301

[kwmsmith]

Here and below, looks like some pprints made it through.

[bgrant]

Fixed.

[kwmsmith]

There are 21 skips in the IPython test run -- is that normal?

[bgrant]

I did add a bunch of MPI-only tests to test lazy-eval...

[kwmsmith]

So does this allow you to create a context that is always lazy?

[bgrant]

Yeah, or at least lazy from the get-go. It really just sets <context>.lazy = True right off the bat. You can still set it to False later if you want.

[bgrant]

Postponing to 0.7.