Check out some blog posts on BenchPress: an introduction and how to make custom task types.

First, build the project from the root directory.

mvn clean install

Create a tarball for both controller-svc & worker-svc by descending into the respective directories and running:

mvn package assembly:single -DskipTests

The resulting *-dist.tar.gz files in the respective target directories are all you need to deploy BenchPress nodes.

BenchPress comes in two parts: the controller and one or more workers. The two find each other through a common ZooKeeper instance. For a simple setup where the controller and 1 worker live on the same box, you don't need to do anything since the controller will start up an embedded ZooKeeper server and the worker default settings assume the controller and ZooKeeper are on localhost.

If you wish to use an external ZooKeeper, you must provide the connection information.

sh run.sh -Dbenchpress.zookeeper.client.connection-string=zkhost:zkport

In that case, you should inform the controller to not start up an embedded ZooKeeper:

-Dbenchpress.controller.zookeeper.embedded-server.enable=false

Setting system properties like those is also how you can set any of the other configurable system-level parameters in BenchPress. If you wanted to change the controller's HTTP server IP away from the default 127.0.0.1, you could use

-Dbenchpress.controller.http-server.ip=1.2.3.4

when starting the controller. Similarly, you can change the worker's http server ip with

-Dbenchpress.worker.http-server.ip=1.2.3.4

Look in ControllerConfig and WorkerConfig to see more. (Anything with methods annotated with @Config is settable via system properties.)

Jobs are submitted to the controller by PUTing to /job:

curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d @test-jobs/hbase.json http://controller:7000/job

The controller will return a simple HTML page listing the active jobs if you GET /job. You'll need to be running the appropriate server (HBase, in this case) and set up the table and column family.

The controller starts in com.palominolabs.benchpress.controller.ControllerMain which is in the controller-svc module. It starts up an HTTP server, which is what a user interacts with, and a JobFarmer, which is responsible for starting and managing jobs. When you submit a job to the controller, the JobFarmer uses the Netflix Curator Service Discovery implementation to find available workers in ZooKeeper (see JobFarmer.submitJob()), partitions the job, and distributes it to the workers. The JobFarmer handles status updates from the workers (handleProgressReport() and handlePartitionFinishedReport() in JobFarmer) and will provide those reports via getJob().

The worker starts in com.palominolabs.benchpress.worker.WorkerMain which is in the worker-svc module. It starts up an HTTP server for communicating with the controller and a WorkerAdvertiser to register itself as available in ZooKeeper. A controller wishing to utilize the worker first hits the /acquireLock/{controllerId} endpoint (see ControlResource) to lock the worker for its job. Thereafter, the worker is provided with a Partition for the job on the /job/{jobId}/partition endpoint. The worker passes the Partition to its PartitionRunner, which runs the job, reporting back to the controller as specified in the job config.

If you want to use a storage system that's not supported out of the box, or you want more flexibility than the current simple JSON structure allows, you can register your own job types. More documentation is coming soon (pending the completion of an in-progress refactoring of job handling), but if you're impatient you can use HbaseModule as a starting point. After setting up a binding to the appropriate Guice multibinding and using the @Id annotation appropriately, you can then add your custom module name(s) in a comma-separated list as the value of the benchpress.plugin.module-names system property. Stay tuned!

Some spartan notes on getting started with Whirr.

export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=
export EC2_CERT=

benchpress $ ssh-keygen -t rsa -P '' -f whirr-benchpress-rsa-key
benchpress $ whirr launch-cluster --config whirr-benchpress-hbase-0.90.properties
benchpress $ grep -m1 -A1 "hbase\.zookeeper\.quorum" whirr.log|grep value|sed -e 's#.*<value>\(.*\)</value>#\1#'

BenchPress is a project of Palomino Labs. Find the repository on GitHub (https://github.com/palominolabs/benchpress) and see the Palomino Labs blog (http://blog.palominolabs.com) for articles about its development.