Robert Nishihara

Robert is a 5th-year graduate student advised by Michael Jordan doing research in machine learning and distributed systems.
http://www.robertnishihara.com |

Blog Posts

Modern Parallel and Distributed Python: A Quick Tutorial on Ray

Robert Nishihara blog, Distributed Systems, Open Source, Systems, Uncategorized 0 Comments

Ray is an open source project for parallel and distributed Python. This article was originally posted here. Parallel and distributed computing are a staple of modern applications. We need to leverage multiple cores or multiple machines to speed up applications or to run them at a large scale. The infrastructure for crawling the web and responding to search queries are not single-threaded programs running on someone’s laptop but rather collections of services that communicate and interact with one another. This post will describe how to use Ray to easily build applications that can scale from your laptop to a large cluster. Why Ray? Many tutorials explain how to use Python’s multiprocessing module. Unfortunately the multiprocessing module is severely limited in…

Fast Python Serialization with Ray and Apache Arrow

Robert Nishihara blog, Ray

This post was originally posted here. Robert Nishihara and Philipp Moritz are graduate students in the RISElab at UC Berkeley. This post elaborates on the integration between Ray and Apache Arrow. The main problem this addresses is data serialization. From Wikipedia, serialization is … the process of translating data structures or object state into a format that can be stored … or transmitted … and reconstructed later (possibly in a different computer environment). Why is any translation necessary? Well, when you create a Python object, it may have pointers to other Python objects, and these objects are all allocated in different regions of memory, and all of this has to make sense when unpacked by another process on another machine. Serialization and deserialization…

Ray: 0.2 Release

Robert Nishihara blog

This was originally posted on the Ray blog. We are pleased to announce the Ray 0.2 release. This release includes the following: substantial performance improvements to the Plasma object store an initial Jupyter notebook based web UI the start of a scalable reinforcement learning library fault tolerance for actors Plasma Since the last release, the Plasma object store has moved out of the Ray codebase and is now being developed as part of Apache Arrow (see the relevant documentation), so that it can be used as a standalone component by other projects to leverage high-performance shared memory. In addition, our Arrow-based serialization libraries have been moved into pyarrow (see the relevant documentation). In 0.2, we’ve increased the write throughput of the object store…