How to use multiprocessing pool.map with multiple arguments?

Question

In the Python multiprocessing library, is there a variant of pool.map which supports multiple arguments?

text = "test"
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Answer 1

This might be another option. The trick is in the wrapper function that returns another function which is passed in to pool.map. The code below reads an input array and for each (unique) element in it, returns how many times (ie counts) that element appears in the array, For example if the input is

np.eye(3) = [ [1. 0. 0.]
              [0. 1. 0.]
              [0. 0. 1.]]

then zero appears 6 times and one 3 times

import numpy as np
from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool as ThreadPool
from multiprocessing import cpu_count


def extract_counts(label_array):
    labels = np.unique(label_array)
    out = extract_counts_helper([label_array], labels)
    return out

def extract_counts_helper(args, labels):
    n = max(1, cpu_count() - 1)
    pool = ThreadPool(n)
    results = {}
    pool.map(wrapper(args, results), labels)
    pool.close()
    pool.join()
    return results

def wrapper(argsin, results):
    def inner_fun(label):
        label_array = argsin[0]
        counts = get_label_counts(label_array, label)
        results[label] = counts
    return inner_fun

def get_label_counts(label_array, label):
    return sum(label_array.flatten() == label)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    img = np.ones([2,2])
    out = extract_counts(img)
    print('input array: \n', img)
    print('label counts: ', out)
    print("========")
           
    img = np.eye(3)
    out = extract_counts(img)
    print('input array: \n', img)
    print('label counts: ', out)
    print("========")
    
    img = np.random.randint(5, size=(3, 3))
    out = extract_counts(img)
    print('input array: \n', img)
    print('label counts: ', out)
    print("========")

You should get:

input array: 
 [[1. 1.]
 [1. 1.]]
label counts:  {1.0: 4}
========
input array: 
 [[1. 0. 0.]
 [0. 1. 0.]
 [0. 0. 1.]]
label counts:  {0.0: 6, 1.0: 3}
========
input array: 
 [[4 4 0]
 [2 4 3]
 [2 3 1]]
label counts:  {0: 1, 1: 1, 2: 2, 3: 2, 4: 3}
========