Example: Worker Network Communications

Workers are a low-level feature to help use higher level libraries that can operate across multiple hosts. As such, you will generally want to use workers only to launch the backends for these libraries.

To help you get your workers or distributed computing framework components talking to one another, every worker engine run includes an environmental variable CDSW_MASTER_IP with the fully addressable IP of the master engine. Every engine has a dedicated IP access with no possibility of port conflicts.

For instance, the following are trivial examples of two worker engines talking to the master engine.

# master.r

library("cdsw")

# Launch two CDSW workers. These are engines that will run in 
# the same project, execute a given code or script, and exit.
workers <- launch.workers(n=2, cpu=0.2, memory=0.5, env="", script="worker.r")

# Accept two connections, one from each worker. Workers will
# execute worker.r.
for(i in c(1,2)) {
  # Receive a message from each worker and return a response.
  con <- socketConnection(host="0.0.0.0", port = 6000, blocking=TRUE, server=TRUE, open="r+")
  data <- readLines(con, 1)
  print(paste("Server received:", data))
  writeLines("Hello from master!", con)
  close(con)
}

# worker.r

print(Sys.getenv("CDSW_MASTER_IP"))
con <- socketConnection(host=Sys.getenv("CDSW_MASTER_IP"), port = 6000, blocking=TRUE, server=FALSE, open="r+")
write_resp <- writeLines("Hello from Worker", con)
server_resp <- readLines(con, 1)
print(paste("Worker received:  ", server_resp))
close(con)

# master.py

import cdsw, socket

# Launch two CDSW workers. These are engines that will run in 
# the same project, execute a given code or script, and exit.
workers = cdsw.launch_workers(n=2, cpu=0.2, memory=0.5, script="worker.py")

# Listen on TCP port 6000
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind(("0.0.0.0", 6000))
s.listen(1)

# Accept two connections, one from each worker. Workers will
# execute worker.py.
conn, addr = s.accept()
for i in range(2):
    # Receive a message from each worker and return a response.
    data = conn.recv(20)
    if not data: break
    print("Master received:", data)
    conn.send("Hello From Server!".encode())
conn.close()

# worker.py

import os, socket

# Open a TCP connection to the master.
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((os.environ["CDSW_MASTER_IP"], 6000))

# Send some data and receive a response.
s.send("Hello From Worker!".encode())
data = s.recv(1024)
s.close()

print("Worker received:", data)