In this blog post we introduce Ray RLlib, an RL execution toolkit built on the Ray distributed execution framework. RLlib implements a collection of distributed policy optimizers that make it easy to use a variety of training strategies with existing reinforcement learning algorithms written in frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Theano. This enables complex architectures for RL training (e.g., Ape-X, IMPALA), to be implemented once and reused many times across different RL algorithms and libraries. We discuss in more detail the design and performance of policy optimizers in the RLlib paper. What’s next for RLlib In the near term we plan to continue building out RLlib’s set of policy optimizers and algorithms. Our aim is for RLlib to serve …
Anna: A Crazy Fast, Super-Scalable, Flexibly Consistent KVS 🗺
This article cross-posted from the DataBeta blog. There’s fast and there’s fast. This post is about Anna, a key/value database design from our team at Berkeley that’s got phenomenal speed and buttery smooth scaling, with an unprecedented range of consistency guarantees. Details are in our upcoming ICDE18 paper on Anna. Conventional wisdom (or at least Jeff Dean wisdom) says that you have to redesign your system every time you scale by 10x. As researchers, we asked the counter-cultural question: what would it take to build a key-value store that would excel across many orders of magnitude of scale, from a single multicore box to the global cloud? Turns out this kind of curiosity can lead to a system with pretty interesting practical …