The concept groupwin is like the unaligned windows? - stream

groupwin
I use the meaning in esper:
This view groups events into sub-views by the value returned by the specified expression or the combination of values returned by a list of expressions.
I think it is that you have the ability to operate by group,not stream(the group by is used to control how aggregations are grouped.)
unaligned window
In google's dataflow ,unaligned windows means:
By unaligned windows, we mean windows which do not span the entirety of a data source, but instead only a subset of it, such as per-user windows.
And does these mean the same thing?
Set<event> XXXX = eventStream.GroupByKey(XXX);

Grouped windows: there is no relationship to aggregations and aggregations are operating only by the group-by clause if there is one. Grouped window for Esper is a way to define the subsets of events that are considered. That is useful various use cases, for example match-recognize pattern matching over a subset of events or just running some function over some subset of events or comparing previous events in the same group with "prev".
In general ability to "operate per-group" in Esper is done by contexts ie. context partition per key.

Related

Can Google dataflow GroupByKey handle hot keys?

Input is PCollection<KV<String,String>>
I have to write files by the key and each line as value of the KV group.
In order to group based on Key, I have 2 options :
1. GroupByKey --> PCollection<KV<String, Iterable<String>>>
2. Combine.perKey.withhotKeyFanout --> PCollection
where value String is accumulated Strings from all pairs.
(Combine.CombineFn<String, List<String>, CustomStringObJ>)
I can have a millon records per key.The collection of keyed-data is optimised using Windows and Trigger, still can have thousands of entries per key.
I worry the max size of String will cause issue if Combine.perKey.withHotKeyFanout is used to create a CustomStringObJ which has List<String> as member to be written in the file.
If we use GroupByKey, how to handle hot keys?
You should use the approach with GroupByKey, not use Combine to concatenate a large string. The actual implementation (not unique to Dataflow) is that elements are shuffled according to their key and in the output KV<K, Iterable<V>> the iterable of values is a particular lazy/streamed view on the elements shuffled to that key. There is no actual iterable constructed - this is just as good as routing each element to the worker that owns each file and writing it directly.
Your use of windows and triggers might actually force buffering and make this less efficient. You should only use event time windowing if it is part of your business case; it isn't a mechanism for controlling performance. Triggers are good for managing how data is batched up and sent downstream, but most useful for aggregations where triggering less frequently saves a lot of data volume. For a raw grouping of the elements, triggers tend to be less useful.

General principle to implement node-based workflow as seen in Unreal, Blender, Alteryx and the like?

This topic is difficult to Google, because of "node" (not node.js), and "graph" (no, I'm not trying to make charts).
Despite being a pretty well rounded and experienced developer, I can't piece together a mental model of how these sorts of editors get data in a sensible way, in a sensible order, from node to node. Especially in the Alteryx example, because a Sort module, for example, needs its entire upstream dataset before proceeding. And some nodes can send a single output to multiple downstream consumers.
I was able to understand trees and what not in my old data structures course back in the day, and successfully understand and adapt the basic graph concepts from https://www.python.org/doc/essays/graphs/ in a real project. But that was a static structure and data weren't being passed from node to node.
Where should I be starting and/or what concept am I missing that I could use implement something like this? Something to let users chain together some boxes to slice and dice text files or data records with some basic operations like sort and join? I'm using C#, but the answer ought to be language independent.
This paradigm is called Dataflow Programming, it works with stream of data which is passed from instruction to instruction to be processed.
Dataflow programs can be programmed in textual or visual form, and besides the software you have mentioned there are a lot of programs that include some sort of dataflow language.
To create your own dataflow language you have to:
Create program modules or objects that represent your processing nodes realizing different sort of data processing. Processing nodes usually have one or multiple data inputs and one or multiple data output and implement some data processing algorithm inside them. Nodes also may have control inputs that control how given node process data. A typical dataflow algorithm calculates output data sample from one or many input data stream values as for example FIR filters do. However processing algorithm also can have data values feedback (output values in some way are mixed with input values) as in IIR filters, or accumulate values in some way to calculate output value
Create standard API for passing data between processing nodes. It can be different for different kinds of data and controlling signals, but it must be standard because processing nodes should 'understand' each other. Data usually is passed as plain values. Controlling signals can be plain values, events, or more advanced controlling language - depending of your needs.
Create arrangement to link your nodes and to pass data between them. You can create your own program machinery or use some standard things like pipes, message queues, etc. For example this functional can be implemented as a tree-like structure whose nodes are your processing nodes, and have references to next nodes and its appropriate input that process data coming from the output of the current node.
Create some kind of nodes iterator that starts from begin of the dataflow graph and iterates over each processing node where it:
provides next data input values
invokes node data processing methods
updates data output value
pass updated data output values to inputs of downstream processing nodes
Create a tool for configuring nodes parameters and links between them. It can be just a simple text file edited with text editor or a sophisticated visual editor with GUI to draw dataflow graph.
Regarding your note about Sort module in Alteryx - perhaps data values are just accumulated inside this module and then sorted.
here you can find even more detailed description of Dataflow programming languages.

In beam custom combine function, does serialization occur even if the object is on "same" machine?

We have a custom combine function (on beam sdk 2.0) in which the millions of objects get accumulated but they do NOT necessarily get reduced....that is, they sometimes get added to a List such that eventually, the List might get quite large (hundreds of megabytes, even gigabytes).
To minimize the problem of having to "pass around" these objects (during merging of accumulators) between nodes, we've created a SINGLE giant node (of 64 cores, tonnes of RAM).
So, in "theory", dataflow does not need to serialize the List object (and any of these big objects in the List) even during "merge accumulator" operations, since all the objects are on the same node. But, does dataflow still serialize even if all the objects of interest are on the same node or is it smart enough to know that an object is on the same node vs separate nodes?
Ideally, when objects are on same node, we can just pass around references to the objects (rather than serializing/deserializing the contents of these objects, which can be very very large.) (I understand, of course, than when dealing with multiple nodes, there's no choice but to serialize/deserialize since the data has to be passed around somehow; but within a node, is beam sdk 2.0 smart enough to not serialize/deserialize during these combine functions, group by's etc.?)
The Dataflow service aggressively optimizes your pipeline to avoid needless serialization. The optimization you are interested in is fusion, described here in the Dataflow documentation. When data moves through a fused "stage" (a sequence of low-level instructions roughly corresponding to steps in your input pipeline), it is not serialized and deserialized.
However, if your CombineFn builds a list, and that list grows large, you should try to rephrase your pipeline to use a raw GroupByKey. Another important optimization is "combiner lifting" or "mapper-side combine" where your CombineFn is applied per-key locally prior to shuffling your data between machines, based on the assumption that the accumulator will be smaller than just a list of elements. So the whole list will be serialized, shuffled, and deserialized prior to completing the Combine transform. If, instead, you use a GroupByKey directly, your elements would be much more efficiently streamed, without serializing an entire list.
I should note that Beam's other runners also perform standard fusion optimization and others. These all generally come from functional programming work in the late 80s / early 90s and was applied to distributed data processing in FlumeJava, circa 2010, so it is a baseline expectation now.

How can I emit summary data for each window even if a given window was empty?

It is really important for my application to always emit a "window finished" message, even if the window was empty. I cannot figure out how to do this. My initial idea was to output an int for each record processed and use Sum.integersGlobally and then emit a record based off that, giving me a singleton per window, I could then simply emit one summary record per window, with 0 if the window was empty. Of course, this fails, and you have to use withoutDefaults which will then emit nothing if the window was empty.
Cloud Dataflow is built around the notion of processing data that is likely to be highly sparse. By design, it does not conjure up data to fill in those gaps of sparseness, since this will be cost prohibitive for many cases. For a use case like yours where non-sparsity is practical (creating non-sparse results for a single global key), the workaround is to join your main PCollection with a heartbeat PCollection consisting of empty values. So for the example of Sum.integersGlobally, you would Flatten your main PCollection<Integer> with a secondary PCollection<Integer> that contains exactly one value of zero per window. This assumes you're using an enumerable type of window (e.g. FixedWindows or SlidingWindows; Sessions are by definition non-enumerable).
Currently, the only way to do this would be to write a data generator program that injects the necessary stream of zeroes into Pub/Sub with timestamps appropriate for the type of windows you will be using. If you write to the same Pub/Sub topic as your main input, you won't even need to add a Flatten to your code. The downside is that you have to run this as a separate job somewhere.
In the future (once our Custom Source API is available), we should be able to provide a PSource that accepts an enumerable WindowFn plus a default value and generates an appropriate unbounded PCollection.

Creating a linked list using CUDA

Is it possible to create a linked list on a GPU using CUDA?
I am trying to do this and I am encoutering some difficulties.
If I can't allocate dynamic memory in a CUDA kernel, then how can I create a new node and add it to the linked list?
You really don't want to do this if you can help it - the best thing you can do if you can't get away from linked lists is to emulate them via arrays and use array indices rather than pointers for your links.
There are some valid use cases for linked lists on a GPU. Consider using a Skip List as an alternative as they provide faster operations. There are examples of highly concurrent Skip List algorithms available via Google searches.
Check out this link http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/mainakc/lockfree.html/
for CUDA code a PDF and PPT presentation on a number of lock free CUDA data structures.
Link Lists can be constructed in parallel using a reduction algorithm approach. This assumes that ALL members are known at construction time. Each thread starts by connecting 2 nodes. Then half the threads connect the 2 node segments together and so on, reducing the number threads by 2 each iteration. This will build a list in log2 N time.
Memory allocation is a constraint. Pre-allocate all the nodes in an array on the host. Then you can use array subscripts in place of pointers. That has the advantage that the list traversal is valid on the GPU and the host.
For concurrency you need to use CUDA atomic operations. Atomic add/increment to count the nodes used from the node array and Compare and Swap to to set the links between nodes.
Again carefully consider the use case and access patterns. Using one large linked list is very serial. Using 100 - 100's of small Linked list is more parallel. I expect the memory access be uncoalesced unless care is taken to allocate connected nodes in adjacent memory locations.
I agree with Paul, linked lists are a very 'serial' way of thinking. Forget what you've learned about serial operations and just do everything at once : )
take a look at Thrust for the way of doing common operations

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