parallelly 1.36.0 is on CRAN since May 2023. The parallelly package is part of the Futureverse and enhances the parallel package of base R, e.g. it adds several features you’d otherwise expect to see in parallel. The parallelly package is one of the internal work horses for the future package, but it can also be used outside of the future ecosystem.

In this most recent release, parallelly gained several new skills in how cluster nodes (a.k.a. parallel workers) can be managed. Most notably,

• the isNodeAlive() function can now also query parallel workers running on remote machines. Previously, this was only possible to workers running on the same machine.

• the killNode() function gained the power to terminate parallel workers running also on remotes machines.

• the new function cloneNode() can be used to “restart” a cluster node, e.g. if a node was determined to no longer be alive by isNodeAlive(), then cloneNode() can be called to launch an new parallel worker on the same machine as the previous worker.

• The print() functions for PSOCK clusters and PSOCK nodes reports on the status of the parallel workers.

Examples

Assume we’re running a PSOCK cluster of two parallel workers – one running on the local machine and the other on a remote machine that we connect to over SSH. Here is how we can set up such a cluster using parallelly:

library(parallelly)

cl <- makeClusterPSOCK(c("localhost", "server.remote.org"))
print(cl)
# Socket cluster with 2 nodes where 1 node is on host 'server.remote.org' (R
# version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), 1 node is on host
# 'localhost' (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

We can check if these two parallel workers are running. We can check this even if they are busy processing parallel tasks. The way isNodeAlive() works is that it checks of the process is running on worker’s machine, which is something that can be done even when the worker is busy. For example, let’s check the first worker process that run on the current machine:

print(cl[[1]])
## RichSOCKnode of a socket cluster on local host 'localhost' with pid 2457339
## (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) using socket connection
## #3 ('<-localhost:11436')

isNodeAlive(cl[[1]])
## [1] TRUE

In parallelly (>= 1.36.0), we can now also query the remote machine:

print(cl[[2]])
## RichSOCKnode of a socket cluster on remote host 'server.remove.org' with
## pid 7731 (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) using socket
## connection #4 ('<-localhost:11436')

isNodeAlive(cl[[2]])
## [1] TRUE

We can also query all parallel workers of the cluster at once, e.g.

isNodeAlive(cl)
## [1] TRUE TRUE

Now, imagine if, say, the remote parallel process terminates for some unknown reasons. For example, the code running in parallel called some code that causes the parallel R process to crash and terminate. Although this “should not” happen, we all experience it once in a while. Another example is that the machine is running out of memory, for instance due to other misbehaving processes on the same machine. When that happens, the operating system might start killing processes in order not to completely crash the machine.

When one of our parallel workers has crashed, it will obviously not respond to requests for processing our R tasks. Instead, we will get obscure errors like:

y <- parallel::parLapply(cl, X = X, fun = slow_fcn)
## Error in summary.connection(connection) : invalid connection

We can see that the second parallel worker in our cluster is no longer alive by:

isNodeAlive(cl)
## [1] TRUE FALSE

We can also see that there is something wrong with the one of our workers if we call print() on our RichSOCKcluster and RichSOCKnode objects, e.g.

print(cl)
## Socket cluster with 2 nodes where 1 node is on host 'server.remote.org'
## (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), 1 node is
## on host 'localhost' (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), platform
## x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). 1 node (#2) has a broken connection (ERROR:
## invalid connection)

and

print(cl[[1]])
## RichSOCKnode of a socket cluster on local host 'localhost' with pid
## 2457339 (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) using
## socket connection #3 ('<-localhost:11436')

print(cl[[2]])
## RichSOCKnode of a socket cluster on remote host 'server.remote.org'
## with pid 7731 (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
## using socket connection #4 ('ERROR: invalid connection')

If we end up with a broken parallel worker like this, we can since parallelly 1.36.0 use cloneNode() to re-create the original worker. In our example, we can do:

cl[[2]] <- cloneNode(cl[[2]])
print(cl[[2]])
## RichSOCKnode of a socket cluster on remote host 'server.remote.org'
## with pid 19808 (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
## using socket connection #4 ('<-localhost:11436')

to get a working parallel cluster, e.g.

isNodeAlive(cl)
## [1] TRUE TRUE

and

y <- parallel::parLapply(cl, X = X, fun = slow_fcn)
str(y)
## List of 8
##  $ : num 1
##  $ : num 1.41
##  $ : num 1.73

We can also use cloneNode() to launch additional workers of the same kind. For example, say we want to launch two more local workers and one more remote worker, and append them to the current cluster. One way to achieve that is:

cl <- c(cl, cloneNode(cl[c(1,1,2)]))
print(cl)
## Socket cluster with 5 nodes where 3 nodes are on host 'localhost'
## (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), 2
## nodes are on host 'server.remote.org' (R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16),
## platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

Now, consider we launching many heavy parallel tasks, where some of them run on remote machines. However, after some time, we realize that we have launched tasks that will take much longer to resolve than we first anticipated. If we don’t want to wait for this to resolve by itself, we can choose to terminate some or all of the workers using killNode(). For example,

killNode(cl)
## [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE

will kill all parallel workers in our cluster, even if they are busy running tasks. We can confirm that these worker processes are no longer alive by calling:

isNodeAlive(cl)
## [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE

If we would attempt to use the cluster, we’d get the “Error in unserialize(node$con) : error reading from connection” as we saw previously. After having killed our cluster, we can re-launch it using cloneNode(), e.g.

cl <- cloneNode(cl)
isNodeAlive(cl)
## [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE

The new cluster managing skills enhances the future ecosystem

When we use the cluster and multisession parallel backends of the future package, we rely on the parallelly package internally. Thanks to these new abilities, the Futureverse can now give more informative error message whenever we fail to launch a future or when we fail to retrieve the results of one. For example, if a parallel worker has terminated, we might get:

f <- future(slow_fcn(42))
## Error: ClusterFuture (<none>) failed to call grmall() on cluster
## RichSOCKnode #1 (PID 29701 on 'server.remote.org'). The reason reported
## was 'error reading from connection'. Post-mortem diagnostic: No process
## exists with this PID on the remote host, i.e. the remote worker is no
## longer alive

That post-mortem diagnostic is often enough to realize something quite exceptional has happened. It also gives us enough information to troubleshooting the problem further, e.g. if we keep seeing the same problem occurring over and over for a particular machine, it might suggest that there is an issue on that machine and we want to exclude it from further processing.

We could imagine that the future package would not only give us information on why things went wrong, but it could theoretically also try to fix the problem automatically. For instance, it could automatically re-create the crashed worker using cloneNode(), and re-launch the future. It is on the roadmap to add such robustness to the future ecosystem later on. However, there are several things to consider when doing so. For instance, what should happen if it was not a glitch, but that there is one parallel task that keeps crashing the parallel workers over and over? Most certainly, we want to only retry a fixed number of times, before giving up, otherwise we might get stuck in a never ending procedure. But even so, what if the problematic parallel code brings down the machine where it runs? If we have automatic restart of workers and parallel tasks, we might end up bringing down multiple machines before we notice the problem. So, although it appears fairly straightforward to handle crashed workers automatically, we need to come up with a robust, well-behaving strategy for doing so before we can implement it.

I hope you find this useful. If you have questions or comments on parallelly, or the Futureverse in general, please use the Futureverse Discussion forum.

Henrik

Links

• parallelly package: CRAN, GitHub, pkgdown
• future package: CRAN, GitHub, pkgdown
• Futureverse: https://www.futureverse.org