The double backquote is used to enter in verbatim mode, which can be used as the escaping character. There are some restrictions about the * and `` syntax. They cannot not be nested, content may not start or end with whitespace: * text* is wrong, it must be separated from surrounding text by non-word characters like a space.
Reason for following piece of comments are prefixed with 'r', being a raw-string.
r"""Validate behavior with network_metadata.
Ensure we handle ``NUMACell``\ s that have ``network_metadata`` set
along with those where this is unset.
""