[infinispan-dev] TopologySafe Map / Reduce

[Emmanuel Bernard]

Pedro and I have been having discussions with the LEADS guys on their experience of Map / Reduce especially around stability during topology changes.

This ties to the .size() thread you guys have been exchanging on (I only could read it partially).

On the requirements, theirs is pretty straightforward and expected I think from most users.
They are fine with inconsistencies with entries create/updated/deleted between the M/R start and the end.
They are *not* fine with seeing the same key/value several time for the duration of the M/R execution. This AFAIK can happen when a topology change occurs.

Here is a proposal.
Why not run the M/R job not per node but rather per segment?
The point is that segments are stable across topology changes. The M/R tasks would then be about iterating over the keys in a given segment.

The M/R request would send the task per segments on each node where the segment is primary.
(We can imagine interesting things like sending it to one of the backups for workload optimization purposes or sending it to both primary and backups and to comparisons).
The M/R requester would be in an interesting situation. It could detect that a segment M/R never returns and trigger a new computation on another node than the one initially sent.

One tricky question around that is when the M/R job store data in an intermediary state. We need some sort of way to expose the user indirectly to segments so that we can evict per segment intermediary caches in case of failure or retry.

But before getting ahead of ourselves, what do you thing of the general idea? Even without retry framework, this approach would be more stable than our current per node approach during topology changes and improve dependability.

Emmanuel