Quickstart

Introducing Rain Applications

Rain Applications are programs defined on client side and executed on Rain infrastructure using the Rain API. Rain automaticaly distributes execution of the applications in a distributed environment.

Rain Applications follows the paradigm of task oriented programming. Basic building blocks for every Rain App are tasks - generic abstraction units representing various kinds of computations ranging from native Python tasks to 3rd party software.

Rain tasks may be arbitrarily* chained together and so provide complex high-level functionality.

Writing your first Rain Application

This section demonstrate how to start Rain infrastructure locally and execute a simple “Hello world” application.

• Start Rain infrastructue Although, the components of Rain (server and governor(s)) can be started manually, in order to simplify this process, we provide “rain start” command to do it for you automatically. The following command starts server and one local governor. (Starting Rain infrastructure on distributed systems is described in Starting infrastructure.):

  $ rain start --simple
  

• Running “Hello World” example. The following Python program creates a task that joins two strings (This example is more explained in Section tasks-and-objs.):

  from rain.client import Client, tasks, blob
  
  # Connect to server
  client = Client("localhost", 7210)
  
  # Create a new session
  with client.new_session() as session:
  
      # Create task (and two data objects)
      task = tasks.Concat((blob("Hello "), blob("world!"),))
  
      # Mark that the output should be kept after submit
      task.output.keep()
  
      # Submit all crated tasks to server
      session.submit()
  
      # Wait for completion of task and fetch results and get it as bytes
      result = task.output.fetch().get_bytes()
  
      # Prints 'Hello world!'
      print(result)