ray/doc/basic-usage.md

Basic Usage

To use Ray, you need to understand the following:

• How Ray uses object references to represent immutable remote objects.
• How Ray constructs computation graphs using remote functions.

Immutable remote objects

In Ray, we can create and manipulate objects. We refer to these objects as remote objects, and we use object references to refer to them. Remote objects are stored in object stores, and there is one object store per node in the cluster. In the cluster setting, we may not actually know which machine each object lives on.

An object reference is essentially a unique ID that can be used to refer to a remote object. If you're familiar with Futures, our object references are conceptually similar.

We assume that remote objects are immutable. That is, their values cannot be changed after creation. This allows remote objects to be replicated in multiple object stores without needing to synchronize the copies.

Put and Get

The commands ray.get and ray.put can be used to convert between Python objects and object references, as shown in the example below.

>>> x = [1, 2, 3]
>>> ray.put(x)
<ray.ObjRef at 0x1031baef0>

The command ray.put(x) would be run by a worker process or by the driver process (the driver process is the one running your script). It takes a Python object and copies it to the local object store (here local means on the same node). Once the object has been stored in the object store, its value cannot be changed.

In addition, ray.put(x) returns an object reference, which is essentially an ID that can be used to refer to the newly created remote object. If we save the object reference in a variable with ref = ray.put(x), then we can pass ref into remote functions, and those remote functions will operate on the corresponding remote object.

The command ray.get(ref) takes an object reference and creates a Python object from the corresponding remote object. For some objects like arrays, we can use shared memory and avoid copying the object. For other objects, this currently copies the object from the object store into the memory of the worker process. If the remote object corresponding to the object reference ref does not live on the same node as the worker that calls ray.get(ref), then the remote object will first be copied from an object store that has it to the object store that needs it.

>>> ref = ray.put([1, 2, 3])
>>> ray.get(ref)
[1, 2, 3]

If the remote object corresponding to the object reference ref has not been created yet, the command ray.get(ref) will wait until the remote object has been created.

Computation graphs in Ray

Ray represents computation with a directed acyclic graph of tasks. Tasks are added to this graph by calling remote functions.

For example, a normal Python function looks like this.

def add(a, b):
  return a + b

A remote function in Ray looks like this.

@ray.remote([int, int], [int])
def add(a, b):
  return a + b

The information passed to the @ray.remote decorator includes type information for the arguments and for the return values of the function. Because of the distinction that we make between submitting a task and executing the task, we require type information so that we can catch type errors when the remote function is called instead of catching them when the task is actually executed.

However, the only piece of information that is fundamentally required by the system is the number of return values (because the system must assign the correct number of object references to the outputs before the function has actually executed and produced any outputs).

Remote functions

Whereas in regular Python, calling add(1, 2) would return 3, in Ray, calling add(1, 2) does not actually execute the task. Instead, it adds a task to the computation graph and immediately returns an object reference to the output of the computation.

>>> ref = add(1, 2)
>>> ray.get(ref)
3

There is a sharp distinction between submitting a task and executing the task. When a remote function is called, the task of executing that function is submitted to the scheduler, and the scheduler immediately returns object references for the outputs of the task. However, the task will not be executed until the scheduler actually schedules the task on a worker.

When a task is submitted, each argument may be passed in by value or by object reference. For example, these lines have the same behavior.

>>> add(1, 2)
>>> add(1, ray.put(2))
>>> add(ray.put(1), ray.put(2))

Remote functions never return actual values, they always return object references.

When the remote function is actually executed, it operates on Python objects. That is, if the remote function was called with any object references, the Python objects corresponding to those object references will be retrieved and passed into the actual execution of the remote function.

Blocking computation

In a regular Python script, the specification of a computation is intimately linked to the actual execution of the code. For example, consider the following code.

result = []
for i in range(10):
  result.append(np.zeros(size=[100, 100]))

At the core of the above script, there are 10 separate tasks, each of which generates a 100x100 matrix of zeros. These tasks do not depend on each other, so in principle, they could be executed in parallel. However, in the above implementation, they will be executed serially.

Ray gets around this by representing computation as a graph of tasks, where some tasks depend on the outputs of other tasks and where tasks can be executed once their dependencies have been executed.

For example, suppose we define the remote function zeros to be a wrapper around np.zeros.

from typing import List
import numpy as np

@ray.remote([List[int]], [np.ndarray])
def zeros(shape):
  return np.zeros(shape)

Then we can write

result_refs = []
for i in range(10):
  result.append(zeros([100, 100]))

This adds 10 tasks to the computation graph, with no dependencies between the tasks.

The computation graph looks like this.

In this figure, boxes are tasks and ovals are objects.

The box that says op-root in it just refers to the overall script itself. The dotted lines indicate that the script launched 10 tasks (tasks are denoted by rectangular boxes). The solid lines indicate that each task produces one output (represented by an oval).

It is clear from the computation graph that these ten tasks can be executed in parallel.

Computation graphs encode dependencies. For example, suppose we define

ray.remote([np.ndarray, np.ndarray], [np.ndarray])
def dot(a, b):
  return np.dot(a, b)

Then we run

aref = zeros([10, 10])
bref = zeros([10, 10])
cref = dot(aref, bref)

The corresponding computation graph looks like this.

The three dashed lines indicate that the script launched three tasks (the two zeros tasks and the one dot task). Each task produces a single output, and the dot task depends on the outputs of the two zeros tasks.

This makes it clear that the two zeros tasks can execute in parallel but that the dot task must wait until the two zeros tasks have finished.