Running Builders¶

maggma is designed to run build-pipelines in a production environment. Builders can be run directly in a python environment, but this gives you none of the performance features such as multiprocessing. The base Builder class implements a simple run method that can be used to run that builder:

class MultiplyBuilder(Builder):
    """
    Simple builder that multiplies the "a" sub-document by pre-set value
    """

    ...


my_builder = MultiplyBuilder(source_store,target_store,multiplier=3)
my_builder.run()

A better way to run this builder would be to use the mrun command line tool. Since everything in maggma is MSONable, we can use monty to dump the builders into a JSON file:

from monty.serialization import dumpfn

dumpfn(my_builder,"my_builder.json")

Then we can run the builder using mrun:

mrun my_builder.json

mrun has a number of useful options:

mrun --help
Usage: mrun [OPTIONS] [BUILDERS]...

Options:
  -v, --verbose                   Controls logging level per number of v's
  -n, --num-workers INTEGER RANGE
                                  Number of worker processes. Defaults to
                                  single processing
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

We can use the -n option to control how many workers run process_items in parallel. Similarly, -v controls the logging verbosity from just WARNINGs to INFO to DEBUG output.

The result will be something that looks like this:

2020-01-08 14:33:17,187 - Builder - INFO - Starting Builder Builder
2020-01-08 14:33:17,217 - Builder - INFO - Processing 100 items
Get: 100%|██████████████████████████████████| 100/100 [00:00<00:00, 15366.00it/s]
2020-01-08 14:33:17,235 - MultiProcessor - INFO - Processing batch of 1000 items
Update Targets: 100%|█████████████████████████| 100/100 [00:00<00:00, 584.51it/s]
Process Items: 100%|██████████████████████████| 100/100 [00:00<00:00, 567.39it/s]

There are progress bars for each of the three steps, which lets you understand what the slowest step is and the overall progress of the system.

Running Distributed¶

maggma can distribute work across multiple computers. There are two steps to this:

Run a mrun manager by providing it with a --url to listen for workers on and --num-chunks(-N) which tells mrun how many sub-pieces to break up the work into. You can can run fewer workers then chunks. This will cause mrun to call the builder's prechunk to get the distribution of work and run distributed work on all workers
Run mrun workers b y providing it with a --url to listen for a manager and --num-workers (-n) to tell it how many processes to run in this worker.

The url argument takes a fully qualified url including protocol. tcp is recommended: Example: tcp://127.0.0.1:8080

Running Scripts¶

mrun has the ability to run Builders defined in python scripts or in jupyter-notebooks.

The only requirements are:

The builder file has to be in a sub-directory from where mrun is called.
The builders you want to run are in a variable called __builder__ or __builders__

mrun will run the whole python/jupyter file, grab the builders in these variables and adds these builders to the builder queue.

Assuming you have a builder in a python file: my_builder.py

class MultiplyBuilder(Builder):
    """
    Simple builder that multiplies the "a" sub-document by pre-set value
    """

    ...

__builder__ = MultiplyBuilder(source_store,target_store,multiplier=3)

You can use mrun to run this builder and parallelize for you:

mrun -n 2 -v my_builder.py

Running Multiple Builders¶

mrun can run multiple builders. You can have multiple builders in a single file: json, python, or jupyter-notebook. Or you can chain multiple files in the order you want to run them:

mrun -n 32 -vv my_first_builder.json builder_2_and_3.py last_builder.ipynb

mrun will then execute the builders in these files in order.

Reporting Build State¶

mrun has the ability to report the status of the build pipeline to a user-provided Store. To do this, you first have to save the Store as a JSON or YAML file. Then you can use the -r option to give this to mrun. It will then periodically add documents to the Store for one of 3 different events:

BUILD_STARTED - This event tells us that a new builder started, the names of the sources and targets as well as the total number of items the builder expects to process
UPDATE - This event tells us that a batch of items was processed and is going to update_targets. The number of items is stored in items.
BUILD_ENDED - This event tells us the build process finished this specific builder. It also indicates the total number of errors and warnings that were caught during the process.

These event docs also contain the builder, a build_id which is unique for each time a builder is run and anonymous but unique ID for the machine the builder was run on.

Profiling Memory Usage of Builders¶

mrun can optionally profile the memory usage of a running builder by using the Memray Python memory profiling tool (Memray). To get started, Memray should be installed in the same environment as maggma using pip install memray.

Setting the --memray (-m) option to on, or True, will signal mrun to profile the memory usage of any builders passed to mrun as the builders are running. The profiler also supports profiling of both single and forked processes. For example, spawning multiple processes in mrun with -n will signal the profiler to track any forked child processes spawned from the parent process.

A basic invocation of the memory profiler using the mrun command line tool would look like this:

mrun --memray on my_builder.json

The profiler will generate two files after the builder finishes: 1. An output .bin file that is dumped by default into the temp directory, which is platform/OS dependent. For Linux/MacOS this will be /tmp/ and for Windows the target directory will be C:\TEMP\.The output file will have a generic naming pattern as follows: BUILDER_NAME_PASSED_TO_MRUN + BUILDER_START_DATETIME_ISO.bin, e.g., my_builder.json_2023-06-09T13:57:48.446361.bin. 2. A .html flamegraph file that will be written to the same directory as the .bin dump file. The flamegraph will have a naming pattern similar to the following: memray-flamegraph-my_builder.json_2023-06-09T13:57:48.446361.html. The flamegraph can be viewed using any web browser.

Note: Different platforms/operating systems purge their system's temp directory at different intervals. It is recommended to move at least the .bin file to a more stable location. The .bin file can be used to recreate the flamegraph at anytime using the Memray CLI.

Using the flag --memray-dir (-md) allows for specifying an output directory for the .bin and .html files created by the profiler. The provided directory will be created if the directory does not exist, mimicking the mkdir -p command.

Further data visualization and transform examples can be found in Memray's documentation (Memray reporters).