Prerequisites

Kubernetes

mlbench uses Kubernetes as basis for the distributed cluster. This allows for easy and reproducible installation and use of the framework on a multitude of platforms.

Since mlbench manages the setup of nodes for experiments and uses Kubernetes to monitor the status of worker pods, it needs to be installed with a service-account that has permission to manage and monitor Pods and StatefulSets.

Additionally, helm requires a kubernetes user account with the cluster-admin role to deploy applications to a kubernetes cluster.

Google Cloud

For Google Cloud see: Creating a Cluster and Kubernetes Quickstart.

Make sure credentials for your cluster are installed correctly (use the correct zone for your cluster):

gcloud container clusters get-credentials ${CLUSTER_NAME} --zone us-central1-a

Helm

Helm charts are like recipes to install Kubernetes distributed applications. They consist of templates with some logic that get rendered into Kubernetes deployment .yaml files They come with some default values, but also allow users to override those values.

Helm can be found here

Helm needs to be set up with service-account with cluster-admin rights:

kubectl --namespace kube-system create sa tiller
kubectl create clusterrolebinding tiller --clusterrole cluster-admin --serviceaccount=kube-system:tiller
helm init --service-account tiller