Stefan Richter created FLINK-5052: ------------------------------------- Summary: Changing the maximum parallelism (number of key groups) of a job Key: FLINK-5052 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-5052 Project: Flink Issue Type: Improvement Components: State Backends, Checkpointing Reporter: Stefan Richter
Through dynamic rescaling, Flink jobs can already adjust their parallelism and each operator only has to read it's assigned key-groups. However, the maximum parallelism is determined by the number of key-groups (aka maxParallelism), which is currently fixed forever after the job is first started. We could consider to relax this limitations, so that users can modify the number of key-groups after the fact, which is useful in particular for upscaling jobs from older Flink versions (<1.2) which must be converted with maxparallelism == parallelism. In the general case, changing the maxParallelism can lead to shuffling of keys between key-groups, which means that a change in the number of key-groups can shuffle keys between key-groups and we would have to read the complete state on each operator instance, filtering for those keys that actually fall into the key-groups assigned to the operator instances. While it is certainly possible to support this, it is obviously a very expensive operation. Fortunately, the assignment of keys to operators is currently determined as follows: {{operatorInstance = computeKeyGroup(key) * parallelism / maxParallelism}} This means that we can provide more efficient support for upscaling of maxParallelism, if {{newMaxParallelism == n * oldMaxParallelism}}. In this case, keys are not reshuffled between key-groups, but key-groups are split by a factor n instead. This only focus on some old key-groups when restoring operator instances for new maxParallelism and significantly reduces the amount of unnecessary data transfer, e.g. ~ 1/2 for increasing maxParallelism by a factor 2, ~2/3 when increasing by a factor 3, etc. Implementing this feature would require the following steps: - Introduce/modify state handles with the capability to summarize multiple logical keygroups into one mixed physical entity. - Enhance StateAssignmentOperation so that it can deal with and correctly assign the new/modified keyed state handles to subtasks on restoring a checkpoint. We also need to implement how to compute the correct super-key-group, but this is rather simple. - Filtering out key clippings on restoring in the backends. -- This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v6.3.4#6332)