Database: async "bulk" requests
The state of #3 (closed) is a request being made each time a non-locally-cached IPC is requested. If the DB is ever distant (on a remote host) with a RTT of more than a few milliseconds, this will be just disastrous for performance eg. for the quadratic part.
A better option might be to preload all the cached results before going through the compute benchs phase, doing so using asyncio to "hide" the latency.