Skip to main content
Pre-release

This release is a pre-release and may not be stable for production use.

Launchpad

PyPI - Python Version PyPI version

Launchpad is a library that simplifies writing distributed programs by seamlessly launching them on a variety of different platforms. Switching between local and distributed execution requires only a flag change.

Launchpad introduces a programming model that represents a distributed system as a graph data structure (a Program) describing the system’s topology. Each node in the program graph represents a service in the distributed system, i.e. the fundamental unit of computation that we are interested in running. As nodes are added to this graph, Launchpad constructs a handle for each of them. A handle ultimately represents a client to the yet-to-be-constructed service. A directed edge in the program graph, representing communication between two services, is created when the handle associated with one node is given to another at construction time. This edge originates from the receiving node, indicating that the receiving node will be the one initiating communication. This process allows Launchpad to define cross-service communication simply by passing handles to nodes. Launchpad provides a number of node types, including:

  • PyNode - a simple node executing provided Python code upon entry. It is similar to a main function, but with the distinction that each node may be running in separate processes and on different machines.
  • CourierNode - it enables cross-node communication. CourierNodes can communicate by calling public methods on each other either synchronously or asynchronously via futures. The underlying remote procedure calls are handled transparently by Launchpad.
  • ReverbNode - it exposes functionality of Reverb, an easy-to-use data storage and transport system primarily used by RL algorithms as an experience replay. You can read more about Reverb here.
  • MultiThreadingColocation - allows to colocate multiple other nodes in a single process.
  • MultiProcessingColocation - allows to colocate multiple other nodes as sub processes.

Using Launchpad involves writing nodes and defining the topology of your distributed program by passing to each node references of the other nodes that it can communicate with. The core data structure dealing with this is called a Launchpad program, which can then be executed seamlessly with a number of supported runtimes.

Supported launch types

Launchpad supports a number of launch types, both for running programs on a single machine, in a distributed manner, or in a form of a test. Launch type can be controlled by the launch_type argument passed to lp.launch method, or specified through the --lp_launch_type command line flag. Please refer to the documentation of the LaunchType for details.

Table of Contents

Installation

Please keep in mind that Launchpad is not hardened for production use, and while we do our best to keep things in working order, things may break or segfault.

:warning: Launchpad currently only supports Linux based OSes.

The recommended way to install Launchpad is with pip. We also provide instructions to build from source using the same docker images we use for releases.

TensorFlow can be installed separately or as part of the pip install. Installing TensorFlow as part of the install ensures compatibility.

$ pip install dm-launchpad[tensorflow]

# Without Tensorflow install and version dependency check.
$ pip install dm-launchpad

Nightly builds

PyPI version

$ pip install dm-launchpad-nightly[tensorflow]

# Without Tensorflow install and version dependency check.
$ pip install dm-launchpad-nightly

Similarily, Reverb can be installed ensuring compatibility:

$ pip install dm-launchpad[reverb]

Develop Launchpad inside a docker container

The most convenient way to develop Launchpad is with Docker. This way you can compile and test Launchpad inside a container without having to install anything on your host machine, while you can still use your editor of choice for making code changes. The steps are as follows.

Checkout Launchpad's source code from GitHub.

$ git checkout https://github.com/deepmind/launchpad.git
$ cd launchpad

Build the Docker container to be used for compiling and testing Launchpad. You can specify tensorflow_pip parameter to set the version of Tensorflow to build against. You can also specify which version(s) of Python container should support. The command below enables support for Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10.

$ docker build --tag launchpad:devel \
  --build-arg tensorflow_pip=tensorflow==2.3.0 \
  --build-arg python_version="3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10" - < docker/build.dockerfile

The next step is to enter the built Docker image, binding checked out Launchpad's sources to /tmp/launchpad within the container.

$ docker run --rm --mount "type=bind,src=$PWD,dst=/tmp/launchpad" \
  -it launchpad:devel bash

At this point you can build and install Launchpad within the container by executing:

$ /tmp/launchpad/oss_build.sh

By default it builds Python 3.8 version, you can change that with --python flag.

$ /tmp/launchpad/oss_build.sh --python 3.8

To make sure installation was successful and Launchpad works as expected, you can run some examples provided:

$ python3.8 -m launchpad.examples.hello_world.launch
$ python3.8 -m launchpad.examples.consumer_producers.launch --lp_launch_type=local_mp

To make changes to Launchpad codebase, edit sources checked out from GitHub directly on your host machine (outside of the Docker container). All changes are visible inside the Docker container. To recompile just run the oss_build.sh script again from the Docker container. In order to reduce compilation time of the consecutive runs, make sure to not exit the Docker container.

Citing Launchpad

If you use Launchpad in your work, please cite the accompanying technical report:

@article{yang2021launchpad,
    title={Launchpad: A Programming Model for Distributed Machine Learning
           Research},
    author={Fan Yang and Gabriel Barth-Maron and Piotr Stańczyk and Matthew
            Hoffman and Siqi Liu and Manuel Kroiss and Aedan Pope and Alban
            Rrustemi},
    year={2021},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.04516},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04516},
}

Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate all the help from Reverb and TF-Agents teams in setting up building and testing setup for Launchpad.

Other resources

Metadata

Release files for dm-launchpad-nightly 0.3.0.dev20220326

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Built distributions (wheels)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for dm-launchpad-nightly 0.3.0.dev20220326
File
dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp310-cp310-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl CPython 3.10 CPython 3.10 Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64 Details
dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp39-cp39-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl CPython 3.9 CPython 3.9 Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64 Details
dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp38-cp38-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl CPython 3.8 CPython 3.8 Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64 Details
dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp37-cp37m-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl CPython 3.7 CPython 3.7 pymalloc Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64 Details

Total release size: 40.1 MB

Release files / dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp310-cp310-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl

Download URL dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp310-cp310-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl
Size 10.0 MB
Tags CPython 3.10 Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
3e178ec8ff06007c934eb1ea1ff431f46ac97ed6f2294bb19998dab7c0104ddc
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
461b24492c52092f32e586c965ce006e21116452c2491bd3dd759d3d889422ee
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/3.8.0 pkginfo/1.8.2 readme-renderer/34.0 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 urllib3/1.26.9 tqdm/4.63.1 importlib-metadata/4.8.3 keyring/23.4.1 rfc3986/1.5.0 colorama/0.4.4 CPython/3.6.9

Release files / dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp39-cp39-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl

Download URL dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp39-cp39-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl
Size 10.0 MB
Tags CPython 3.9 Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
2a2d13d411f0244bb27a03471902206425cb09f53fc1694cf4ab3bc68b94102a
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
212b430856900e9a63896bd29b5a9402cc68d5eb8ee97b89b992cedcc2b519e3
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/3.8.0 pkginfo/1.8.2 readme-renderer/34.0 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 urllib3/1.26.9 tqdm/4.63.1 importlib-metadata/4.8.3 keyring/23.4.1 rfc3986/1.5.0 colorama/0.4.4 CPython/3.6.9

Release files / dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp38-cp38-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl

Download URL dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp38-cp38-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl
Size 10.0 MB
Tags CPython 3.8 Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
af17bf0c43d160e5aab6149c9798b1b6f0ef7d4d1c492190852ba08e60d9b54b
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
dd6a5b68740456b4f67b43694817cbacb4985f1ccb33c9efdd222700bdfb11cf
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/3.8.0 pkginfo/1.8.2 readme-renderer/34.0 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 urllib3/1.26.9 tqdm/4.63.1 importlib-metadata/4.8.3 keyring/23.4.1 rfc3986/1.5.0 colorama/0.4.4 CPython/3.6.9

Release files / dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp37-cp37m-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl

Download URL dm_launchpad_nightly-0.3.0.dev20220326-cp37-cp37m-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl
Size 10.0 MB
Tags CPython 3.7 CPython 3.7 pymalloc Linux glibc 2.17+ x86-64
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
ed7d96cfdc79462f3ae6c411a48a89a20a91a1ba31eaa2372550de1c9d7f36e6
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
5da6b84c3558e909458cbe3456d35293c35ce9356b92134c89e94c2590029ef8
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/3.8.0 pkginfo/1.8.2 readme-renderer/34.0 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 urllib3/1.26.9 tqdm/4.63.1 importlib-metadata/4.8.3 keyring/23.4.1 rfc3986/1.5.0 colorama/0.4.4 CPython/3.6.9

Security for dm-launchpad-nightly 0.3.0.dev20220326

Provenance

Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.

No provenance found

None of the files in this release were uploaded with provenance metadata.

A note on package security

PyPI is a repository for distributing packages, not a service for auditing them. While third-party security researchers and our staff do their best to detect and remove malicious packages, PyPI cannot guarantee the quality, security or suitability of any given package.

To learn more about protecting yourself from malicious actors, visit our package security documentation.

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release
Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page