title: Limit Dask CPU and Memory Usage (Single Node)
body: <p>I am running Dask on a single computer where running <code>.compute()</code> to perform the computations on a huge parquet file will cause dask to use up all the CPU cores on the system.</p>
  
  <pre><code>import dask as dd
  
  df = dd.read_parquet(parquet_file)  # very large file
  print(df.names.unique().compute())
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is it possible to configure dask to use a specific number of CPU cores and limit its memory usage to say 32 GB? Using Python 3.7.2 and Dask 2.9.2.</p>