Nimbus is a framework for fast cloud computing applications. It is developed by a group of researchers at Stanford University. Nimbus supports jobs with short tasks and hight task rate. The range of applications includes machine learning, graph processing and graphical simulations. Nimbus's control plane implements a novel abstraction, called execution termplates that allows Nimbus to scale out and provide orders of magnitude higher task throughput compared to counterpart frameworks. Nimbus introduces a simple geometric based interface and a translation layer for automatic distribution of graphical simulations in the cloud. For more information please refer to Nimbus website.

Followings are concise instructions on how to build and use Nimbus. For the complete instructions please refer to the docs folder or access an online version of the Nimbus documentation.

Nimbus is built using make and requires a gcc compiler. We have tested Nimbus with gcc versions 4.5, 4.8 and 5.4, on Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04 and 16.04. Also, you might be able to build Nimbus on OSX (although it is not officially supported). To build Nimbus, first install make and gcc on your system (you most probably already have them). For example, on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install gcc
$ sudo apt-get install g++
$ sudo apt-get install make

Then issue make at Nimbus root directory:

$ make

It builds the nimbus core library and external library dependencies along with a group of applications. Nimbus library uses boost, protobuf, and leveldb header files and libraries. However, you do not need to install them separately. They are locally installed as part of Nimbus built, automatically.

The build might take few minutes. You could use -j <number of threads> option with make for faster turn around. After the build is successful, you can test basic functionalities by running simple end-to-end applications. For example, at the root, issue:

$ make test-basics

For complete building instructions and how to build and run graphical simulations with Nimbus please refer to the documentations, at Building Nimbus.

You can run basic, one controller one worker, application examples with a single script. From the root directory call ./scripts/run-examples.sh. For example, you can run logistic regression application as follows:

$ ./scripts/run-examples.sh lr 

To see other available examples through this script use the -h options:

$ ./scripts/run-examples.sh -h

Also, You can run more complex examples easily with one controller against multiple workers. Use the scripts to launch controller and workers from the root directory. To launch the controller against two worker, and split the application domain along x-axis, issue:

$ ./scripts/start-controller.sh -w 2 --split 2 1 1

This script starts the controller locally and redirects the controller stdout/stderr to files in logs/ folder. If you want to run the controller in the foreground and flush the logs in to current console use the --fg option. There are numerous options that you can use for the controller. For the entire list, issue:

$ ./scripts/start-controller.sh -h

Now you need to launch the workers to run against the controller. To launch the two workers to run for example the k-means application, issue:

$ ./scripts/start-workers.sh 2 -l applications/ml/k_means/libk_means.so

This script launches two workers, and redirects their stdout/stderr to files in logs/ folder. To print the logs in the console use the --fg option; in case of multiple workers it opens a terminal for each worker. Also, workers have multiple options, to see the complete list:

$ ./scripts/start-workers.sh -h