Partitioning

Partition Function

In Hama BSP computing framework, the Partition function is used for obtaining scalability of a Bulk Synchronous Parallel processing, and determining how to distribute the slices of input data among BSP processors. Unlike Map/Reduce data processing model, many scientific algorithms based on Message-Passing Bulk Synchronous Parallel model often requires that a processor obtain “nearby or related” data from other processors in order to complete the computation. In this case, you can create your own Partition function for determining processor inter-communication and how to distribute the data.

Internals

Internally, File format input data partitioning works as following sequence:

• If user specified partition function, internally, "partitioning job" is ran as a pre-processing step.
  • Each task of "partitioning job" reads its assigned data block and rewrite them to particular partition files.
  • Job Scheduler assigns partitions to proper task based on partition ID.
• After pre-partitioning done, launch the BSP job.
  

Other suggestions are:

• Instead of running a separate job, we inject a partitioning superstep before the first superstep of the job. (This has a dependency on the Superstep API) For graph jobs, we can configure this partitioning superstep class specific to graph partitioning class that partitions and loads vertices. - Suraj Menon
  • Since scaling the number of BSP tasks between supersteps in single job, is not possible, the key is "how to launch the number of tasks differently with the number of file blocks". - Edward J. Yoon
• The partitions instead of being written to HDFS, which is creating a copy of input files in HDFS Cluster (too costly I believe), should be written to local files and read from. - Suraj Menon
  • If we want to run multiple jobs on same input, for example, friendship graph is input and want to run PageRank job and SSSP job, ...., etc., reuse of partitions should be considered. If partitions are written on local fs, metadata should be managed to reuse them. - Edward J. Yoon
    

In NoSQLs table input case (which supports range or random access by sorted key), partitions doesn't need to be rewritten. In addition, Scanner instead of basic 'region' or 'tablet' splits can be used for forcing the number of processors.

• Job Scheduler assigns Scanner or tablet with its partition ID to proper task, launch the BSP job.
  

Partitioning internals in Graph module

The internals of the Graph module implemented on top of BSP framework, are pretty simple. Input data partitioning will be done at BSP framework level. Each GraphJobRunner processors just reads assigned splits, and loads parsed vertices into vertices storage at loadVertices() method. If you want to learn details and internals about Graph job, Please see also Design of Graph Module.

Create your own Partitioner

Tutorial

....

  BSPJob job = new BSPJob(conf);
  ...
  job.setPartitioner(HashPartitioner.class);
  ...

Specify the partition files and directories

If the input is already partitioned, you can skip pre-partitioning step as following configuration:

  ...