Very interesting stuff Matt!
I find the design that leverages on Infinispan for distributing the
tasks - while maximizing locality and exploiting Infinispan's
fault-tolerance capabilities - modular and elegant. It will be
interesting to evaluate if there is a significant overhead with respect
to a purely JGroups-based mechanism.
We will be looking at your code, and may pheraps come up with some
use-cases.
Cheers,
Paolo
On 5/9/13 10:52 AM, Manik Surtani wrote:
Hi Matt.
Thanks for resurrecting and sorry for not responding on the original
thread.
Interesting discussions. I would intuitively agree with Bela were it
not for the fact that, as you said, you're actually storing data,
require high availability of that data during server failure, and may
possibly chain tasks (as per a local fork-join) and want to maintain
server affinity across related tasks.
You could achieve all of this with JGroups but would end up
re-implementing certain bits of Infinispan, specifically:
- task failover
- task cancelling
- consistent hash based node selection for delivery, ensuring affinity
across data and tasks
So I think it is a pretty valid use case to make use of what
Infinispan already has.
I'll have a look at your sources and comment more. I'm sure Paolo and
others at CloudTM will probably do the same.
Cheers
Manik
On 9 May 2013, at 01:50, Matt Hoffman <matt(a)mhoffman.org
<mailto:matt@mhoffman.org>> wrote:
> Resurrecting this topic: I've put some sample code on my fork here:
>
https://github.com/matthoffman/infinispan/tree/dfj
> There's a README there that offers an overview. I hope to do some
> performance comparisons over the weekend, but in the meantime, the
> code is there if you're curious.
>
> I'm mainly interested whether this is the type of thing that
> Infinispan may be interested in, as an alternative to the current
> distributed executor (much like the ForkJoinPool in the JDK is an
> alternative to a traditional thread pool).
> If so, the next steps would be to do some performance tests, pick one
> implementation to move forward with (out of the 3 prototypes on that
> branch) and clean it up sufficiently to be considered for a pull
> request.
>
> If its not something that Infinispan is interested in, then I'll
> change approaches and make it more generic, so that it isn't
> Infinispan-specific and can be used with other transports. I'm open
> to either option... I think there are pros and cons either way.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> matt
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 7:07 AM, Paolo Romano <romano(a)inesc-id.pt
> <mailto:romano@inesc-id.pt>> wrote:
>
> This sounds really interesting Matt. In the Cloud-TM project
> (
www.cloudtm.eu <
http://www.cloudtm.eu/>) we are currently
> developing a parallel graph-analysis algorithm on top of
> Infinispan's DEF. I would be really curious to take a look at the
> framework you developed, and see how it could be exploited in our
> application.
>
> Regards,
>
> Paolo
>
>
> --
>
> Paolo Romano, PhD
> Coordinator of the Cloud-TM ICT FP7 Project (
www.cloudtm.eu
<
http://www.cloudtm.eu/>)
> Senior Researcher @ INESC-ID (
www.inesc-id.pt <
http://www.inesc-id.pt/>)
> Assistant Professor @ Instituto Superior Tecnico (
www.ist.utl.pt
<
http://www.ist.utl.pt/>)
> Rua Alves Redol, 9
> 1000-059, Lisbon Portugal
> Tel.+ 351 21 3100300 <tel:%2B%20351%2021%203100300>
> Fax+ 351 21 3145843 <tel:%2B%20351%2021%203145843>
> Webpagehttp://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~romanop
<
http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/%7Eromanop>
>
>
>
> On 3/2/13 5:40 PM, matt hoffman wrote:
>>
>> Hey guys,
>>
>> I've been working on a prototype of integrating Infinispan into
>> our app. We do a lot of distributed processing across a small
>> cluster, so I've played with Infinispan's existing distributed
>> execution framework (which is nice), as well as using Infinispan
>> alongside a normal message queue to distribute tasks. But I've
>> also put together a prototype of a new distributed execution
>> framework using fork-join pools that you all might be interested
>> in. If it sounds like something that would be worthwhile for
>> Infinispan, I can raise a Jira and submit a pull request with
>> what I have so far. I'd need to get the CA and company policy
>> stuff finalized; that might take a couple days. Meanwhile, in
>> case there is any interest, I've described the approach I've
>> taken below.
>>
>> First, a little background:
>>
>> A while back I worked on a side project that integrated a
>> distributed work-stealing algorithm into the standard JDK
>> fork-join queue. It used JGroups for communication, because it
>> was quick and easy for prototyping. So this week I thought i'd
>> take a stab at porting that over to Infinispan. The algorithm I
>> came up with for Infinispan is a bit less of a work-stealing
>> algorithm, to take advantage of Infinispan's built-in
>> distribution capabilities, but I think it's still fairly efficient.
>>
>> My basic approach was to take in a cache in the constructor,
>> much like the existing distributed executor, and then create a
>> parallel, DIST-mode cache that uses the same hash & grouping
>> configuration as the original cache. That new parallel cache is
>> the "task cache", and we use that to distribute available tasks
>> across the cluster. It's a distributed cache so that tasks are
>> partitioned across a large cluster, and it uses the hashing
>> config of the original cache and a KeyAffinityService to attempt
>> to distribute the tasks to the same nodes that contain the data
>> being worked on. Nodes use cache listeners to be notified when
>> there is new work available, and the atomic replace() to "check
>> out" the tasks for execution, and "check in" the results.
>>
>> The basic algorithm is something like this:
>>
>> For a refresher, a normal FJ pool has a fork() method that takes
>> in a task, and then places that task on an internal queue
>> (actually, one of several queues). When threads are idle, they
>> look to the nearest work queue for work. If that work queue does
>> not have work, they "steal" work from another thread's queue.
>> So in the best case, tasks remain on the same thread as the task
>> that spawned them, so tasks that process the same data as their
>> parents may still have that data in the CPU's cache, etc.
>> There's more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.
>>
>> This distributed algorithm just adds an extra layer on top for
>> tasks that are marked "distributable" (by extending
>> DistributedFJTask instead of the normal ForkJoinTask). When you
>> call fork() with a DistributedFJTask, it first checks to see if
>> the local pool's work queue is empty. If so, we just go ahead
>> and submit it locally; there's no reason to distribute it. If
>> not, we put the task in the task cache, and let Infinispan
>> distribute it. When a node has no more work to do in its
>> internal fork-join queues, it looks at the task cache and tries
>> to pull work from there.
>>
>> So, it isn't really a "work-stealing" algorithm, per se; the
>> distributable tasks are being distributed eagerly using
>> Infinispan's normal cache distribution. But I'm hoping that
>> doing that also makes it easier to handle node failure, since
>> nodes collectively share a common picture of the work to be done.
>>
>> This approach required one change to the actual FJ classes
>> themselves (in org.infinispan.util.concurrent.jdk8backported).
>> That's probably the most controversial change. I had to make the
>> original ForkJoinTask's fork() method non-final in order to
>> extend it cleanly. There's probably a way around that, but
>> that's the cleanest option I have thought of thus far.
>>
>> And lastly, it's not done yet: basic task distribution is
>> working, but I haven't tackled failover to any real extent yet.
>> The biggest questions, though, are around what to do with the
>> existing distributed execution interfaces. For example,
>> DistributedTask has a getCallable() method because it assumes
>> it's wrapping a Callable. But ForkJoinTasks don't extend
>> Callable. I could put in a shim to wrap the DistributedFJTasks
>> into Callables for the sake of that method, but I don't know if
>> it's worth it. Similarly, the DistributedExecutorService
>> interface exposes a lot of submit-to-specific-address or
>> submit-to-all-addresses methods, which are an odd fit here since
>> tasks are distributed via their own cache. Even if I used a
>> KeyAffinityService to target the task to the given Address, it
>> might get picked up by another node that shares that same
>> hash. But I can add in a direct-to-single-Address capability in
>> if that seems worthwhile. Alternately, I can just use entirely
>> different interfaces (DistributedFJExecutorService,
>> DistributedFJTask?).
>>
>> Thoughts? Concerns? Glaring issues?
>>
>>
>>
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--
Manik Surtani
manik(a)jboss.org <mailto:manik@jboss.org>
twitter.com/maniksurtani <
http://twitter.com/maniksurtani>
Platform Architect, JBoss Data Grid
http://red.ht/data-grid
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