Shared state
Data that more than one task reads or writes. Shared mutable state is what turns a parallel run into a race condition.
Where state genuinely must be shared, an actor gives you one owner for it rather than many uncoordinated writers.
Distributed compute
Related terms
- Actor: A distributed object that holds state across many calls. Created by applying the distribute decorator to a class rather than a function.
- Task: One unit of distributed work: a single call to a function decorated with the distribute decorator. Tasks are stateless, so each call starts fresh.
- Independent work: Units of work that can each produce their result without needing another unit’s output. A precondition for distributing anything.