Re: [infinispan-dev] Further dist.exec and M/R API improvements

Do we really need special support for distributed tasks to write results to another cache? We already allow a task to do cache.getCacheManager().getCache("outputCache").put(k, v)

> >> I was thinking we add a concept of >> DistributedTaskExecutionListener which can be specified in >> DistributedTaskBuilder: >> >> DistributedTaskBuilder<T> >> executionListener(DistributedTaskExecutionListener<K, T> listener); >> >> >> We needed DistributedTaskExecutionListener anyway. All distributed tasks >> might use some feedback about task progress, completion/failure and on. >> My proposal is roughly: >> >> >> public interface DistributedTaskExecutionListener<K, T> { >> >> void subtaskSent(Address node, Set<K> inputKeys); >> void subtaskFailed(Address node, Set<K> inputKeys, Exception e); >> void subtaskSucceded(Address node, Set<K> inputKeys, T result); >> void allSubtasksCompleted(); >> >> } >> >> So much for that. > I think this it would make sense to add this logic for monitoring, + additional info such as average execution time etc. I'm not sure if this is a generally useful API though, unless there were people asking for it already? Ok, noted. If you remember any references about this let me know and I'll incorporate what people actually asked for rather than guess. Ok, let's wait until we get some actual requests from users then. TBH I don't think distributed tasks with subtasks are something that users care about. E.g. with Map/Reduce the reduce tasks are not subtasks of the map/combine tasks, so this API wouldn't help. Hadoop has a Reporter interface that allows you to report "ticks" and increment counters, maybe we should add something like that instead?

I think we should allow each distributed task to deal with output in its own way, the existing API should be enough.

>> public interface MapReduceTaskExecutionListener { >> >> void mapTaskInitialized(Address executionAddress); >> void mapTaskSucceeded(Address executionAddress); >> void mapTaskFailed(Address executionTarget, Exception cause); >> void mapPhaseCompleted(); >> >> void reduceTaskInitialized(Address executionAddress); >> void reduceTaskSucceeded(Address executionAddress); >> void reduceTaskFailed(Address address, Exception cause); >> void reducePhaseCompleted(); >> >> } > IMO - in the first stage at leas - I would rather use a simpler (Notifying)Future, on which the user can wait till the computation happens: it's simpler and more aligned with the rest of our async API. > What do you mean? We already have futures in MapReduceTask API. This API is more fine grained and allows monitoring/reporting of task progress. Please clarify. I'm not sure about the usefulness of an API like this either... if the intention is to allow the user to collect statistics about duration of various phases, then I think exposing the durations via MapReduceTasks would be better.

>> while MapReduceTask would have an additional method: >> >> public void execute(Cache<KOut, VOut> resultsCache); > you could overload it with cache name only method. Yeah, good idea. Same for usingIntermediateCache? I actually asked you this here https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-4021 +1 to allow a cache name only. For the intermediate cache I don't think it makes sense to allow a Cache version at all.