At the moment we have a Genetic Algorithm (GA) that runs quite a while, and I thought we could distribute it using Fabric because theoretically it fits nicely as a microservice. This is my first try at Fabric.
How should we do it ? Should we have a stateful service that runs and aggregates other actors tasks ? It's kinda similar to this project: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/service-fabric-dotnet-data-streaming-websockets
I'm not really sure how to go and there is not much documented on this subjects. This GA is really extensive and our goal is to distribute it's calculations.
I implemented a basic genetic algorithm app with Service Fabric as an app building exercise. Not sure if my approach is the best way to do things for your scenario, but I can describe what I did.
My app consisted of only actors, both stateful and stateless. I had a Processor stateful actor which provided all the management tasks and drove the algorithm. Because it was stateful, it maintained the history of all the genetic state across each of the generations that were produced. I also had a FitnessEvalTask stateless actor. This task was simply responsible for evaluating the fitness of an entity. Its input was the gene representation and its output was the fitness value. The idea was that you'd be spinning up instances of this actor at a high rate and they'd be distributed appropriately. The Processor app, being responsible for driving the algorithm, would create the necessary instances of the FitnessEvalTask actors and provide their input and have them report back with their fitness values and do the necessary processing afterwards. My client process, just a simple console app, would communicate with the Processor actor to initiate the algorithm and perform any necessary management tasks.