3 ms·

Rayforce

30 points by tosh 5mo ago

noelwelsh 5mo ago
I thought "morsel-driven" was AI slop, but it turns out to be in common usage in the HPC world. So I learned something from this post!
- tosh 5mo ago
  afaiu morsel-driven means the workload gets turned into 'smallish' chunks (morsels) instead of having to pre-allocate upfront (e.g. 4 nodes get 1/4 each) it is more granular and dynamic a worker that's "done" can request another morsel pragmatic approach because nodes might not all be equally fast (cache, cpu frequency, throttling, …) and also some morsel workloads take longer than others depending on the values they contain and what kind of work needs to get done so this approach tends to balance out nicely I'm sure someone else can explain it better / correct me (please do!)
  - hetoku 5mo ago
    Exactly!
  - noelwelsh 5mo ago
    When I read up, it sounded like the same idea as work-stealing to me. Not surprising that different fields come up with the same idea under different terminology.
  - adsharma 5mo ago
    DuckDB and LadybugDB use the same terminology to describe internals.
- hetoku 5mo ago
  [flagged]
arikrahman 5mo ago
Any relation to the smash hit SHMUP of the same name?
- viktorsovietov 5mo ago
  No
  - arikrahman 5mo ago
    Bummer
cma256 5mo ago
> Rayforce is a library you link, not a server you deploy. The C API is small enough to wrap from any language with an FFI. I'm familiar with large-scale, commercial, client-server use cases for columnar analytics and graph traversal but what is the use case for an embedded server like this?
- hetoku 5mo ago
  [dead]
- 392 5mo ago
  Perhaps the fact that 99+% of today's workloads could be running on the client if it were as easy as shipping Rayforce and the data directly to the client. Besides that, pure C that you can embed into your app is much easier to deploy for some (and likely 100x more performant) than stuff that comes via Helm chart [cries in JVM 'big'-data solutions]
noitpmeder 5mo ago
Is this competing with e.g. an embedded duckdb?
- hetoku 5mo ago
  [flagged]
aktau 5mo ago
> Rayforce is a pure C17 zero-dependency embeddable engine where columnar analytics and graph traversals share a single operation DAG, pass through a multi-pass optimizer, and execute as fused morsel-driven bytecode. No malloc. Sounds great. I hadn't seen an (explicitly) C17 project before. I wonder which features of it they use. I can only find very scant references in the depot (E.g.: https://github.com/RayforceDB/rayforce/blob/6c4b1eddad0ea7285a4c867f7b5b218834ce0342/src/ops/filter.c#L37 https://github.com/RayforceDB/rayforce/blob/6c4b1eddad0ea728...). Anyone know?
- hetoku 5mo ago
  [flagged]

30 points by tosh 5mo ago

I thought "morsel-driven" was AI slop, but it turns out to be in common usage in the HPC world. So I learned something from this post!

tosh 5mo ago
afaiu morsel-driven means the workload gets turned into 'smallish' chunks (morsels) instead of having to pre-allocate upfront (e.g. 4 nodes get 1/4 each) it is more granular and dynamic a worker that's "done" can request another morsel pragmatic approach because nodes might not all be equally fast (cache, cpu frequency, throttling, …) and also some morsel workloads take longer than others depending on the values they contain and what kind of work needs to get done so this approach tends to balance out nicely I'm sure someone else can explain it better / correct me (please do!)
- hetoku 5mo ago
  Exactly!
- noelwelsh 5mo ago
  When I read up, it sounded like the same idea as work-stealing to me. Not surprising that different fields come up with the same idea under different terminology.
- adsharma 5mo ago
  DuckDB and LadybugDB use the same terminology to describe internals.
hetoku 5mo ago
[flagged]

arikrahman 5mo ago

Any relation to the smash hit SHMUP of the same name?

viktorsovietov 5mo ago
No
- arikrahman 5mo ago
  Bummer

cma256 5mo ago

> Rayforce is a library you link, not a server you deploy. The C API is small enough to wrap from any language with an FFI. I'm familiar with large-scale, commercial, client-server use cases for columnar analytics and graph traversal but what is the use case for an embedded server like this?

hetoku 5mo ago
[dead]
392 5mo ago
Perhaps the fact that 99+% of today's workloads could be running on the client if it were as easy as shipping Rayforce and the data directly to the client. Besides that, pure C that you can embed into your app is much easier to deploy for some (and likely 100x more performant) than stuff that comes via Helm chart [cries in JVM 'big'-data solutions]

noitpmeder 5mo ago

Is this competing with e.g. an embedded duckdb?

hetoku 5mo ago
[flagged]

aktau 5mo ago

> Rayforce is a pure C17 zero-dependency embeddable engine where columnar analytics and graph traversals share a single operation DAG, pass through a multi-pass optimizer, and execute as fused morsel-driven bytecode. No malloc. Sounds great. I hadn't seen an (explicitly) C17 project before. I wonder which features of it they use. I can only find very scant references in the depot (E.g.: https://github.com/RayforceDB/rayforce/blob/6c4b1eddad0ea7285a4c867f7b5b218834ce0342/src/ops/filter.c#L37 https://github.com/RayforceDB/rayforce/blob/6c4b1eddad0ea728...). Anyone know?

hetoku 5mo ago
[flagged]