In the jupyter notebook:

In [1]: %bg result = long_call()

Immediately returns while the call runs and updates variable result when finished. Uses threading as the calls are assumed to be IO-bound, e.g. waiting for queries or remote jobs to run.

In [2]: future = %bg long_call()

Returns a future (see concurrent.futures).

1. pip install git+https://github.com/cfperez/bg_run
2. In notebook: %load_ext bg_run