[wcrossbow]

I was taken by surprise too by the false dichotomy presented:

> 1. Try breaking the data into chunks, and then using multi-processing (ugly in Python) to leverage a more powerful cloud virtual machine, sticking with matplotlib

> 2. Write a very small native custom library to do the math we want, using threads

There are a many more ways you could try to go about this, off the top of my head: numba, pypy (or other alternative python), jax/torch/tensorflow, multiprocessing, joblib.