Thank you for the suggestion, but we don't see how simply wrapping a
FileSystem object would be sufficient in our use case. The reason why
is we need to catch and handle read exceptions at the block level.
There aren't any public methods available in the high level FileSystem
abstraction layer that would give us the fine grained control we need at
block level read failures.
Perhaps if I outline the steps more clearly it will help explain what we
are trying to do. Without our enhancements, suppose a user opens a file
stream and starts reading the file from Hadoop. After some time, at some
position into the file, if there happen to be no replicas available for
a particular block for whatever reason, datanodes have gone down due to
disk issues, etc. the stream will throw an IOException
(BlockMissingException or similar) and the read will fail.
What we are doing is rather than letting the stream fail, we have
another stream queued up that knows how to fetch the blocks elsewhere
outside of our Hadoop cluster that couldn't be retrieved. So we need to
be able to catch the exception at this point, and these externally
fetched bytes then get read into the user supplied read buffer. Now
Hadoop can proceed to read in the stream the next blocks in the file.
So as you can see this method of fail over on demand allows an input
stream to keep reading data, without having to start it all over again
if a failure occurs (assuming the remote bytes were successfully fetched).
As a final note I would like to mention that we will be providing our
failover module to the Open Science Grid. Since we hope to provide this
as a benefit to all OSG users running at participating T2 computing
clusters, we will be committed to maintaining this software and any
changes to Hadoop needed to make it work. In other words we will be
willing to maintain any implementation changes that may become necessary
as Hadoop internals change in future releases.
Thanks,
Jeff
On 8/7/13 11:30 AM, Andrew Wang wrote:
I don't think exposing DFSClient and DistributedFileSystem members is
necessary to achieve what you're trying to do. We've got wrapper
FileSystems like FilterFileSystem and ViewFileSystem which you might be
able to use for inspiration, and the HCFS wiki lists some third-party
FileSystems that might also be helpful too.
On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Joe Bounour <jboun...@ddn.com> wrote:
Hello Jeff
Is it something that could go under HCFS project?
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HCFS
(I might be wrong?)
Joe
On 8/7/13 10:59 AM, "Jeff Dost" <jd...@ucsd.edu> wrote:
Hello,
We work in a software development team at the UCSD CMS Tier2 Center. We
would like to propose a mechanism to allow one to subclass the
DFSInputStream in a clean way from an external package. First I'd like
to give some motivation on why and then will proceed with the details.
We have a 3 Petabyte Hadoop cluster we maintain for the LHC experiment
at CERN. There are other T2 centers worldwide that contain mirrors of
the same data we host. We are working on an extension to Hadoop that,
on reading a file, if it is found that there are no available replicas
of a block, we use an external interface to retrieve this block of the
file from another data center. The external interface is necessary
because not all T2 centers involved in CMS are running a Hadoop cluster
as their storage backend.
In order to implement this functionality, we need to subclass the
DFSInputStream and override the read method, so we can catch
IOExceptions that occur on client reads at the block level.
The basic steps required:
1. Invent a new URI scheme for the customized "FileSystem" in
core-site.xml:
<property>
<name>fs.foofs.impl</name>
<value>my.package.FooFileSystem</value>
<description>My Extended FileSystem for foofs: uris.</description>
</property>
2. Write new classes included in the external package that subclass the
following:
FooFileSystem subclasses DistributedFileSystem
FooFSClient subclasses DFSClient
FooFSInputStream subclasses DFSInputStream
Now any client commands that explicitly use the foofs:// scheme in paths
to access the hadoop cluster can open files with a customized
InputStream that extends functionality of the default hadoop client
DFSInputStream. In order to make this happen for our use case, we had
to change some access modifiers in the DistributedFileSystem, DFSClient,
and DFSInputStream classes provided by Hadoop. In addition, we had to
comment out the check in the namenode code that only allows for URI
schemes of the form "hdfs://".
Attached is a patch file we apply to hadoop. Note that we derived this
patch by modding the Cloudera release hadoop-2.0.0-cdh4.1.1 which can be
found at:
http://archive.cloudera.com/cdh4/cdh/4/hadoop-2.0.0-cdh4.1.1.tar.gz
We would greatly appreciate any advise on whether or not this approach
sounds reasonable, and if you would consider accepting these
modifications into the official Hadoop code base.
Thank you,
Jeff, Alja & Matevz
UCSD Physics
