Every once in a while, I like to sit down and read about what is going on outside my current immediate field of interest. This weekend, I chose to focus on efficient information dissemination with very large number of nodes.

The articles of interests for this weekend are HyParView and Epidemic Broadcast Trees (Plumtrees). There are a great read, and complement one another to a nice degree. HyParView is an algorithm that seeks to connect a set (of potentially very large number) of nodes together without trying to make each node connect to each other node. To simplify things, I’m going to talk about clusters of several dozens nodes, the articles have both been tested to the 10,000 nodes and with failure rates of up to 95% of the network. This post is here so I can work out the details in my mind, it may be that I’m wrong, so don’t try to treat this as a definitive source.

Let us assume that we have a network with 15 nodes in it. And we want to add a new node. One way of doing that would be to maintain a list of all the nodes in the system (that are what admins are for, after all) and have the node connect to all the other nodes. In this way, we can communicate between all the nodes very easily. Of course, that means that the number of connections we have in a network of 16(15+ new) nodes is 120. And that utterly ignore the notion of failure. But let us continue with this path, to see what unhappy landscape it is going to land us on.

We have a 15 node cluster, and we add a new node (so we have to give it all the other nodes), and it connects to all the other nodes and register with them. So far, so good. Now, let us say that there is a state change that we want to send to all the nodes in the network. We can do that by connecting to a single node, and having it distribute this information to all the other nodes. Cost of this would be 16 (1 to talk to the first node, then 15 for it to talk to the rest). That is very efficient, and it is easy to prove that this is indeed the most optimal way to disseminate information over the network (each node is only contacted once).

In a 16 node network, maybe that is even feasible. It is a small cluster, after all. But that is a big maybe, and I wouldn’t recommend it. If we grow the cluster size to a 100 node cluster, that gives us about 4,950(!) connections between all nodes, and the cost of sending a single piece of information is still the optimal N. But I think that this is easy to see that this isn’t the way to go about it. Mostly because you can’t do that, not even for the 16 node cluster. Usually when we talk about clusters we like to think about them as flat topologies, but that isn’t actually how it goes. Let us look at a better approximation of a real topology:

Yes, this isn’t quite right, but it is good enough for our purposes.

In this 16 node cluster, we have the green node, which is the one we initially contact to send some data to the entire cluster. What would happen if we tried to talk from that node to all the other nodes? Well, notice how much load it would place on the green’s node router. Or the general cost for the network in the area of the green node. Because of that, just straight on direct connection for the entire cluster is no something that you really want to do.

An alternative to do that, assuming that you have a fixed topology is to create a static tree structure, so you start with the green node, it then contacts three other nodes, who then each contact four other nodes. We still have the nice property so that each node is only getting the new information once. But we can parallelize the communication and reduce the load on a single segment of the network.

Which is great, if we have a static topology and zero failures. In practice, none of those is true, so we want something else, and hopefully something that would make this a lot easier to handle. This is where HyParView comes into play. I sat down and wrote a whole big description of how HyParView works, but it wasn’t something that you couldn’t get from the article. And one of the things that I did along the way was create a small implementation in JavaScript and plug this into a graph visualization, so I could follow what is going on there.

That means that I had to implement the HyParView protocol in JavaScript, but it turned out to be a great way to actually explore how the thing works, and it ended up with great visualization.

You can see it in action in this url, and you can read the actual ocde for the HyParView protocol here.

Here is the cluster at 5 nodes, just after we added E:

And here it is at 9 nodes, after it had a chance to be stable.

Note that we have the connections (active view) from each node to a up to 3 other nodes, but we also have other letters next to the node name, in []. That is the passive list, the list of nodes that we are not connected to, but will try if our connection to the one of the active list goes down.

In addition to just adding themselves to one of the nodes, the nodes will also attempt to learn the topology of the network in such a way that if there is a failure, they can recover from it. The JavaScript code I wrote is not a good JavaScript code, that isn’t my forte, but it should be enough to follow what is going on there. We are able to do very little work to have a self organizing system of nodes that discover the network.

Note that in large networks, none of the nodes would have the full picture of the entire network, but each node will have a partial view of it, and that is enough to send a message through the entire network. But I’m going to talk about this in another post.

In the meantime, go to this url and see it in action, (the actual ocde for the HyParView protocol here). Note that I've made the different action explicit, so you need to do heartbeats (and the algorithm relies on them for healing failures) to get proper behavior for the system. I've also created a predictable RNG, so we can always follow the same path in our iterations.