Installation steps
------------------
Naiad is distributed as a Visual Studio 2013 solution, comprising
the following projects:
* "Naiad", which contains the core Naiad system and support libraries,
and builds Microsoft.Research.Naiad.dll. If you create your own project that
uses Naiad, you must add a reference to this library.
* "Lindi", a LINQ-like library for data-parallel iterative computation.
* "DifferentialDataflow", a LINQ-like library supporting incremental
execution of iterative computation.
* "AzureSupport", a library of Naiad components that supports writing to
and reading from Windows Azure Storage.
* "Examples", which contains several example Naiad applications and
builds Examples.exe.
* In addition, the "ClusterSubmission" solution contains experimental support
for launching Naiad programs on Azure and YARN clusters.
These projects can be built and executed using any of the following
implementations of the .NET framework:
* Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5
To build Naiad, follow the steps below that correspond to your setup.
* Building using Visual Studio
1. Open the Naiad.sln file in this directory using Visual Studio.
2. On the menu bar, click Build > Build Solution, or press F6.
* Building using MSBuild (on Windows, without Visual Studio)
1. Ensure that MSBuild is installed on your local machine. You can
get MSBuild by installing the Microsoft .NET Framwork, version
4.5. Typically, the file MSBuild.exe can be found in the path:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe
However, this path may differ, depending on your local
configuration.
2. Open a command prompt, and change to the directory containing the
Naiad.sln file.
3. At the command prompt, run MSBuild.exe.
Getting started with the example programs
-----------------------------------------
As part of this source distribution, the Examples project demonstrates
how to write simple applications using Naiad. After building the Naiad
solution, you will find the executable Examples.exe in the
Examples\bin\Debug directory.
Examples.exe uses command-line arguments to select an example, and it
is recommended that you run it from a command prompt or terminal. For
example, to run the word count example, follow these steps:
1. Open a command prompt or terminal, and change to the
Examples\bin\Debug directory.
2. At the command prompt, type "Examples.exe" to see the usage and
available examples.
3. At the command prompt, type "Examples.exe wordcount" to get started
with the wordcount example.
Known issues with Naiad
-----------------------
This release of Naiad is an alpha release. The amount of testing the code
has been subjected to is limited, mostly to programs we have written. The
email address naiadquestions@microsoft.com goes to each of the project
members, and is a great place to send questions and comments.
There are several specific issues we know about now, and want to point
out to avoid headaches for everyone involved:
1. In distributed mode, we strongly recommend that each process call
OnNext the same numbers of times before calling OnCompleted.
Several aspects of the graph manager logic consult the epoch numbers
associated with local inputs. Ideally, all process call OnNext the
same number of times; passing no parameters to OnNext causes the
epoch to advance with no input supplied, and is a great way to do this.
2. Naiad currently requires custom datatypes to be structs, rather
than classes. This is not too hard to fix, but does require us
to swing through the code and ensure that every class has an
appropriate default constructor, which all structs have. Structs
also stress the GC a lot less, and are a lot easier to auto-serialize.
Related to this, if you want to use distributed Naiad, the
auto-generated Serialization/Deserialization code requires all of
your fields to be public and mutable (ie: not readonly). This is
because the generated code attempts to set these values on a newly
minted struct, and can’t do this without these settings. More
details on writing custom serialization code in upcoming blog posts.
As Naiad is a research prototype, there are many parts of it that are
likely to change. We’ve tried hard to put interfaces in place that will
remain relatively stable, but there are certainly aspects of the
interfaces we expect will change. Information about programming examples,
the current state of the code, known problems, and upcoming fixes and
features should be available at the project web page:
http://research.microsoft.com/Naiad/,
or at the related blog:
http://bigdataatsvc.wordpress.com/
Contacting us
-------------
If you have questions or comments, please feel welcome to email us at
naiadquestions@microsoft.com
We'd love to hear your thoughts on the project. Thanks!
The Naiad team.