Tutorial on flexible parallelization in Python using Dask and in R using future.
The Dask package in Python and the future package in R provide new flexible approaches for doing parallel computation, both on single machines and for distributed parallelization across multiple machines. One nice feature of Dask is that it provides the ability to create and manipulate distributed datasets (potentially spreading a data object out amongst multiple machines), including easily reading data from disk in parallel.
Please see the overview page at the GitHub pages site to easily view the materials in a browser.