The one line of code is import ray.dataframe as pd They've replaced many pandas functions with an identical API that runs actions in parallel on top of Ray,

The one line of code is import ray.dataframe as pd They've replaced many pandas functions with an identical API that runs actions in parallel on top of Ray, a task-parallel library: https://github.com/ray-project/ray https://github.com/ray-project/ray Unlike Dask, Ray can communicate between processes without serializing and copying data. It uses a shared-memory object store within Apache Arrow: http://arrow.apache.org/blog/2017/08/08/plasma-in-memory-object-store/ http://arrow.apache.org/blog/2017/08/08/plasma-in-memory-obj... Worker processes (scheduled by Ray's computation graph) simply map the required memory region into their address space.