hubit - a calculation hub

At a glance

Hubit is an event-driven orchestration hub for your existing calculation tools. It allows you to

execute calculation tools as one Hubit composite model with a loose coupling between the model components,
centrally configure the interfaces between calculation tools rather than coding them. This allows true separation of responsibility between different teams,
easily run your existing calculation tools asynchronously in multiple processes,
query the Hubit model for specific results thus avoiding explicitly coding (fixed) call graphs and running superfluous calculations,
make parameter sweeps,
feed previously calculated results into new calculations thus augmenting old results,
store results incrementally during execution and restart from previously stored results (model caching),
reuse results if calculations are executed multiple times with the same input (component caching),
visualize your Hubit composite model i.e. visualize your existing tools and the attributes that flow between them.

Motivation

Many work places have developed a rich ecosystem of stand-alone tools. These tools may be developed/maintained by different teams using different programming languages and using different input/output data models. Nevertheless, the tools often depend on results provided the other tools leading to complicated dependencies and error-prone (manual) workflows involving copy & paste. If this sounds familiar you should try Hubit.

By defining input and results data structures that are shared between your tools Hubit allows all your Python-wrappable tools to be seamlessly executed asynchronously as a single model. Asynchronous multi-processor execution often assures a better utilization of the available CPU resources compared to sequential single-processor execution. This is especially true when some time is spent in each component i.e. for CPU bound calculations. In practice this performance improvement often compensates the management overhead introduced by Hubit. Executing a fixed call graph is faster than executing the dynamically created call graph created automatically by Hubit. Nevertheless, a fixed call graph will typically always encompass all relevant calculations and provide all results, which in many cases will represent wasteful compute since only a subset of the results are actually needed. Hubit dynamically creates the smallest possible call graph that can provide the results that satisfy the user's query. Further, Hubit can visualize your existing tools and the data flow between them.

Teaser

The example below is taken from the in-depth tutorial, in the documentation.

To get results from a Hubit model requires you to submit a query, which tells Hubit what attributes from the results data structure you want to have calculated. After Hubit has processed the query, i.e. executed relevant components, the values of the queried attributes are returned in the response.

# Load model from file
hmodel = HubitModel.from_file(
  'model1.yml',
  name='car'
)

# Load the input
with open("input.yml", "r") as stream:
    input_data = yaml.load(stream, Loader=yaml.FullLoader)

# Set the input on the model object
hmodel.set_input(input_data)

# Query the model
query = ['cars[0].price']
response = hmodel.get(query)

The response looks like this

{'cars[0].price': 4280.0}

A query for parts prices for all cars looks like this

query = ['cars[:].parts[:].price']
response = hmodel.get(query)

and the corresponding response is

{
  'cars[:].parts[:].price': [
    [480.0, 1234.0, 178.0, 2343.0, 45.0],
    [312.0, 1120.0, 178.0, 3400.0]
  ]
}

From the response we can see the prices for the five parts that comprise the first car and the prices for the four parts that comprise the second car. The full example illustrates how a second calculation component can be used to calculate the total price for each car.

Hubit can render models and queries. In the example below we have rendered the query cars[0].price i.e. the price of the car at index 0 using

query = ['cars[0].price']
hmodel.render(query)

which yields the graph shown below.

The graph illustrates nodes in the input data structure, nodes in the the results data structure, the calculation components involved in creating the response as well as hints at which attributes flow in and out of these components.

Installation & requirements

Install from pypi

pip install hubit

Install from GitHub

pip install git+git://github.com/mrsonne/hubit.git

To render hubit models and queries you need to install Graphviz (https://graphviz.org/download/). On e.g. Ubuntu, Graphviz can be installed using the command

sudo apt install graphviz