Run the Controller

The felis-controller is written in scala, and is basically a configuration provider and action coordinator for the nodes.

We have switched from sbt to Mill. Mill is much faster than sbt, especially when combining with the OpenJ9 VM installed on our cluster.

Configuring the Nodes

We use a JSON config file to keep the node configuration. config.json is an example. The two parts you should be configuring is nodes and controller.

nodes specifies the name of the node, the ssh hostname (for running the experiment script). You also need to specify a worker socket (the main database worker), and an index shipper socket (deprecated). If you're working on data migration, you need to specify a row shipper socket, similar to the index shipper.

controller part specifies the rpc port other nodes will connect to, and the http port the controller receives command from (curl). See readme on felis side.

Setting Up OpenJ9 (Optional)

This is optional, you can use the Hotspot JDK as well (but make sure you are using JDK11), but OpenJ9 is much faster due to its ability to AOT Java code.

On our cluster, OpenJ9 (JDK11) is already installed at /pkg/java/j9. You need to:

export PATH=/pkg/java/j9/bin:$PATH
export JAVA_HOME=/pkg/java/j9

Compile and Run the Controller

To build the felis-controller jar, use:

mill FelisController.assembly

This will generate a standalone jar out/FelisController/assembly.dest/out.jar. Usually, you can run that jar directly.

java -jar out/FelisController/assembly.dest/out.jar config.json

But if you are sharing the machine with someone else, you need to avoid the cache dir conflict. For example:

java -Dvertx.cacheDirBase=/tmp/$USER/ -jar out/FelisController/assembly.dest/out.jar config.json

Run the Experiment Script

In addition to running the controller and nodes by yourself, we have scripts to run experiments automatically. You still need to write the configuration JSON though.

First, build a jar:

mill FelisExperiments.assembly

Now you can run:

java -jar out/FelisExperiments/assembly.dest/out.jar runXXX

For instance, runYcsb or runHotspotTpcc. See the code for further details.

If you are sharing the machine with someone else, you can tell the script to use your own port for the controller.

java -Dcontroller.host=127.0.0.1:3148 -Dcontroller.http=127.0.0.1:8666 -jar out/FelisExperiments/assembly/dest/out.jar runXXX