Experimental FASTER wrapper for Rust

[dependencies]
faster-rs = "0.11.0"

Includes experimental C interface for FASTER. It is a generic implementation of FASTER that allows arbitrary Key-Value pairs to be stored. This wrapper is only focusing on Linux support.

Install Dependencies (Ubuntu):

$ add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
$ apt update
$ apt install -y g++-7 libaio-dev uuid-dev libtbb-dev

Make sure you clone the submodules as well, this is best done by cloning with git clone --recurse-submodules.

The interface

This wrapper attempts to remain true to the original FASTER design by exposing a similar interface to that which is provided by the original C++ version. Users may define their own Key-Value types and provide custom logic for Read-Modify-Write operations.

The Read, Upsert and RMW operations all require a monotonic serial number to form the sequence of operations that will be persisted by FASTER. Read operations require a serial number so that at a CPR checkpoint boundary, FASTER guarantees that the reads before that point have accessed no data updates after the checkpoint. If persistence is not important, the serial number can safely be set to 1 for all operations (as is done in the examples above).

More information about Checkpointing and Recovery is provided below the following examples.

A basic example

The following example shows the creation of a FASTER Key-Value Store and basic operations on u64 values.

Try it out by running cargo run --example basic.

extern crate faster_rs;

use faster_rs::{status, FasterKv};
use std::sync::mpsc::Receiver;

fn main() {
    // Create a Key-Value Store
    let store = FasterKv::default();
    let key0: u64 = 1;
    let value0: u64 = 1000;
    let modification: u64 = 5;

    // Upsert
    for i in 0..1000 {
        let upsert = store.upsert(&(key0 + i), &(value0 + i), i);
        assert!(upsert == status::OK || upsert == status::PENDING);
    }

    // Read-Modify-Write
    for i in 0..1000 {
        let rmw = store.rmw(&(key0 + i), &(5 as u64), i + 1000);
        assert!(rmw == status::OK || rmw == status::PENDING);
    }

    assert!(store.size() > 0);

    // Read
    for i in 0..1000 {
        // Note: need to provide type annotation for the Receiver
        let (read, recv): (u8, Receiver<u64>) = store.read(&(key0 + i), i);
        assert!(read == status::OK || read == status::PENDING);
        let val = recv.recv().unwrap();
        assert_eq!(val, value0 + i + modification);
        println!("Key: {}, Value: {}", key0 + i, val);
    }

    // Clear used storage
    match store.clean_storage() {
        Ok(()) => {}
        Err(_err) => panic!("Unable to clear FASTER directory"),
    }
}

Using custom keys

structs that can be (de)serialised using serde are supported as keys. In order to use such a struct, it is necessary to derive the implementations of Serializable and Deserializable from serde-derive. All types implementing these two traits will automatically implement FasterKey and thus be usable as a Key.

The following example shows a basic struct being used as a key. Try it out by running cargo run --example custom_keys.

extern crate faster_rs;
extern crate serde_derive;

use faster_rs::{status, FasterKv};
use serde_derive::{Deserialize, Serialize};
use std::sync::mpsc::Receiver;

// Note: Debug annotation is just for printing later
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug)]
struct MyKey {
    foo: String,
    bar: String,
}

fn main() {
    // Create a Key-Value Store
    let store = FasterKv::default();
    let key = MyKey {
        foo: String::from("Hello"),
        bar: String::from("World"),
    };
    let value: u64 = 1;

    // Upsert
    let upsert = store.upsert(&key, &value, 1);
    assert!(upsert == status::OK || upsert == status::PENDING);

    assert!(store.size() > 0);

    // Note: need to provide type annotation for the Receiver
    let (read, recv): (u8, Receiver<u64>) = store.read(&key, 1);
    assert!(read == status::OK || read == status::PENDING);
    let val = recv.recv().unwrap();
    println!("Key: {:?}, Value: {}", key, val);

    // Clear used storage
    match store.clean_storage() {
        Ok(()) => {}
        Err(_err) => panic!("Unable to clear FASTER directory"),
    }
}

Using custom values

structs that can be (de)serialised using serde are supported as values. In order to use such a struct, it is necessary to derive the implementations of Serializable and Deserializable from serde-derive.

In order to use Read-Modify-Write operations on a custom type, it is also necessary to implement the FasterRmw trait which exposes an rmw() function. This function can be used to implement custom logic for Read-Modify-Write operations.

The following example shows a basic struct being used as a value. Try it out by running cargo run --example custom_values.

extern crate faster_rs;
extern crate serde_derive;

use faster_rs::{status, FasterKv};
use serde_derive::{Deserialize, Serialize};
use std::sync::mpsc::Receiver;

// Note: Debug annotation is just for printing later
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug)]
struct MyValue {
    foo: String,
    bar: String,
}

fn main() {
    // Create a Key-Value Store
    let store = FasterKv::default();
    let key: u64 = 1;
    let value = MyValue {
        foo: String::from("Hello"),
        bar: String::from("World"),
    };

    // Upsert
    let upsert = store.upsert(&key, &value, 1);
    assert!(upsert == status::OK || upsert == status::PENDING);

    assert!(store.size() > 0);

    // Note: need to provide type annotation for the Receiver
    let (read, recv): (u8, Receiver<MyValue>) = store.read(&key, 1);
    assert!(read == status::OK || read == status::PENDING);
    let val = recv.recv().unwrap();
    println!("Key: {}, Value: {:?}", key, val);

    // Clear used storage
    match store.clean_storage() {
        Ok(()) => {}
        Err(_err) => panic!("Unable to clear FASTER directory"),
    }
}

Out-of-the-box implementations of FasterRmw

Several types already implement FasterRmw along with providing Read-Modify-Write logic. The implementations can be found in src/impls.rs but their RMW logic is summarised here:

• Numeric types use addition
• Bools and Chars replace old value for new value
• Strings and Vec append modification
• HashSet performs union operation

Checkpoint and Recovery

FASTER's fault tolerance is provided by Concurrent Prefix Recovery (CPR). It provides the following semantics:

If operation X is persisted, then all operations before X in the input operation sequence are persisted as well (and none after).

Persisting operations is done using the checkpoint() function. It is also important to periodically call the refresh() function as it is the mechanism threads use to report forward progress to the system.

Individual sessions (threads accessing FASTER) will persist a different number of operations. The most recently persisted serial number is returned by the continue_session() function and allows reasoning about which operations were (not) persisted. It is also the operation sequence number from which the thread should continue to provide operations after recovery.

A good demonstration of checkpointing/recovery can be found in examples/sum_store_single.rs. Try it out for yourself!

$ cargo run --example sum_store_single -- populate
$ cargo run --example sum_store_single -- recover <checkpoint-token>

Benchmarking

It is possible to benchmark both the C-wrapper and the Rust-wrapper of FASTER. To build and run the C-benchmark follow Microsoft's instructions here and then run the binary benchmark-c. It takes the same parameters and input format as the original benchmark.

Running the Rust benchmark

The benchmark is written as a separate crate in the benchmark directory. Inside the directory run cargo run --release -- help to see the available options.

The benchmark consists of two subcommands cargo run --release -- [process-ycsb|run]:

• process-ycsb will take the output of the supplied YCSB file and produce an output file containing only the 8-byte key in the format expected by the Rust & C benchmarks
• run will actually execute the benchmark using the supplied load and run keys. The workload and number of threads can be customised.

The benchmark is very similar to the original C++ implementation so it's best to follow their instructions for setting up YCSB.