Thanks for sharing this, I will definitely be taking a look at it for a big bootstrap (Monte Carlo) simulation I do. Have you used the parallel extensions in IPython? I have used IPython with great success for the task farming needed in my embarrassingly-parallel context, where the same algorithmic steps need to be applied to hundreds or thousands of data sets. I'll be interested to use your approach and consider the pros and cons, but I like how simple it appears to use.