Shepherd

Provides access to computation resources on a single machine.

Development Guide

Prerequisites

1. Install dependencies with pip install .
2. Make sure you have Docker installed and that your user has permissions to use it
3. If you intend to run computations on a GPU, install also nvidia-docker2

Launching the Shepherd

First, you need to have a Docker registry and a Minio server running. The easiest way to achieve this is to use the Docker Compose example:

docker-compose -f examples/docker/docker-compose-sandbox.yml up -d

Second, you need a configuration file. Again, examples found in the examples/configs/ folder are a great starting point. Feel free to pick one of those and edit it to your needs.

Finally, you need to run the following command to start the shepherd:

shepherd -c examples/configs/shepherd-docker-cpu.yml

Be sure to adjust the command line parameters according to your needs (-h is your host address, -p is the port number where the shepherd API server listens and -c is the path to the configuration file).

After launching the shepherd, there will be an HTTP API available on the configured port that can be used to control the shepherd.

Processing a Request Directly

To process a request for debugging purposes, you need to:

• choose a request id
• create a bucket on your Minio server with a name same as your request id
• put the payload (input for the model) in <yourbucket>/inputs/input.json
• invoke the /start-job API endpoint with your chosen request id
• after the job is processed, the result should be stored in Minio, in <yourbucket>/outputs.json

Running Tests

First, install the test requirements pip install '.[tests]'. The test suite can be run with python setup.py test.

Running Stress Tests

First, install the test requirements pip install '.[tests]'.

To launch stress test, run:

docker-compose -f examples/docker/docker-compose-sandbox.yml up -d
shepherd -c tests/stress/shepherd-bare.yml
molotov tests/stress/loadtest.py -p 2 -w 10 -d 60 -xv

You can modify stress test arguments: -p (number of processes), -w (number of workers) and -d (number of seconds to run the test).

You can also run stress test with time measurements:

molotov --use-extension tests/stress/measure_time.py --max-runs 10 tests/stress/loadtest.py