Python API

You can create a dask.distributed scheduler by importing and creating a Client with no arguments. This overrides whatever default was previously set.

from dask.distributed import Client
client = Client()

You can navigate to http://localhost:8787/status to see the diagnostic dashboard if you have Bokeh installed.

Client

You can trivially set up a local cluster on your machine by instantiating a Dask Client with no arguments

from dask.distributed import Client
client = Client()

This sets up a scheduler in your local process along with a number of workers and threads per worker related to the number of cores in your machine.

If you want to run workers in your same process, you can pass the processes=False keyword argument.

client = Client(processes=False)

This is sometimes preferable if you want to avoid inter-worker communication and your computations release the GIL. This is common when primarily using NumPy or Dask Array.

LocalCluster

The Client() call described above is shorthand for creating a LocalCluster and then passing that to your client.

from dask.distributed import Client, LocalCluster
cluster = LocalCluster()
client = Client(cluster)

This is equivalent, but somewhat more explicit.

You may want to look at the keyword arguments available on LocalCluster to understand the options available to you on handling the mixture of threads and processes, like specifying explicit ports, and so on.

Cluster manager features

Instantiating a cluster manager class like LocalCluster and then passing it to the Client is a common pattern. Cluster managers also provide useful utilities to help you understand what is going on.

For example you can retrieve the Dashboard URL.

>>> cluster.dashboard_link
'http://127.0.0.1:8787/status'

You can retrieve logs from cluster components.

>>> cluster.get_logs()
{'Cluster': '',
'Scheduler': "distributed.scheduler - INFO - Clear task state\ndistributed.scheduler - INFO -   S...

If you are using a cluster manager that supports scaling you can modify the number of workers manually or automatically based on workload.

>>> cluster.scale(10)  # Sets the number of workers to 10

>>> cluster.adapt(minimum=1, maximum=10)  # Allows the cluster to auto scale to 10 when tasks are computed

Reference