Distributed Download for Massive Datasets

Downloads WebVid10m in 10 minutes for $100 of GCP credits. Downloading YouTube datasets like ACAV and HDVILA also works pretty well.

See this presentation for background.

Enable Batch

gcloud services enable batch.googleapis.com

Make your bucket

gsutil mb -b on -l US gs://youtube_download

Example (WebVid)

Generate CSV shards and upload to bucket

./csvsetup.sh

Upload script to bucket

gsutil cp download_webvid10m.sh gs://youtube_download/webvid10m/

Run a test (single task, single machine) to make sure there are no errors

gcloud beta batch jobs submit webvid10m-test --___location=us-central1 --config=job_webvid10m_test.json
gcloud beta batch jobs delete webvid10m-test --___location=us-central1

Run the full batch job (1,000 tasks and 1,000 machines)

gcloud beta batch jobs submit webvid10m --___location=us-central1 --config=job_webvid10m.json

Benchmarking with a test instance

Some times it is useful to manually test your download script before putting it in batch job.

gcloud beta compute instances create benchmarking --machine-type=n2d-highcpu-128 --zone us-east1-b
gcloud compute instances delete benchmarking --zone us-east1-b
gcloud compute ssh --zone "us-east1-b" "benchmarking"