Introduction for ps-lite

A light and efficient implementation of the parameter server framework. It provides clean yet powerful APIs. For example, a worker node can communicate with the server nodes by

• Push(keys, values): push a list of (key, value) pairs to the server nodes
• Pull(keys): pull the values from servers for a list of keys
• Wait: wait untill a push or pull finished.

A simple example:

  std::vector<uint64_t> key = {1, 3, 5};
  std::vector<float> val = {1, 1, 1};
  std::vector<float> recv_val;
  ps::KVWorker<float> w;
  w.Wait(w.Push(key, val));
  w.Wait(w.Pull(key, &recv_val));

More features:

• Flexible and high-performance communication: zero-copy push/pull, supporting dynamic length values, user-defined filters for communication compression
• Server-side programming: supporting user-defined handles on server nodes
• Support for

Build

ps-lite-rdma requires a C++11 compiler such as g++ >= 4.8.

Then clone and build

git clone https://github.com/elvinlife/ps-lite-rdma.git
cd ps-lite-rdma && make -j4

Test

You can test the ps-lite-rdma performance using the shell script provided in ./tests-rdma.

• for local machine

./s_tests-rdma/rdma_local.sh [# of servers] [# of workers] [bin to test] [args...]

• for multiple machines

  same as local machine, just change the script file according to the role of the current machine

About

This is the core source code for USTC team in The 5th Student RDMA Programming Competition. Our team won the first prize in the end.

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