IPython.parallel doesn't do much in the way of serialization. It has custom zero-copy handling of numpy arrays, but other than that, it doesn't do anything other than the bare minimum to make basic interactively defined functions and classes sendable.

There are a few projects that extend pickle to make just about anything sendable, and one of these is dill.

NOTE: This requires IPython 1.0-dev and latest dill, currently only available from: