MLOps Infrastructure & Engineering 11 Aug 2026

Scaling AI Workloads: Understanding the Architecture of Ray

#distributed systems #reinforcement learning #parallel computing #task scheduling #machine learning frameworks #scalable computing #actor model

Scaling AI Workloads: Understanding the Architecture of Ray

In the world of modern AI, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), we face a paradoxical challenge. We need massive parallelism to simulate thousands of environments (stateless work), but we also need centralized state to maintain and update a global model (stateful work).

Traditional distributed frameworks often force a choice: use a MapReduce-style engine for data processing or a dedicated parameter server for training. Ray breaks this dichotomy.

In this post, we dive deep into the architecture of Ray, exploring how it unifies stateless tasks and stateful actors to create a high-performance execution engine for AI.


The Core Intuition: Beyond Centralized Bottlenecks

Most distributed systems rely on a centralized scheduler. While this works for batch processing (like Spark), it becomes a bottleneck for RL, where millisecond-level latency is required for the "Simulation $\rightarrow$ Training $\rightarrow$ Serving" loop.

Ray's primary thesis is to distribute the control plane. By sharding the metadata store and employing a bottom-up scheduling strategy, Ray removes the central bottleneck, allowing it to scale to thousands of nodes while maintaining low latency.

The Dual-Primitive Model

Ray achieves this flexibility through two fundamental primitives:

  1. Tasks (Stateless): Fine-grained, asynchronous functions. Think of these as "fire-and-forget" computations. They are ideal for environment rollouts or data preprocessing.
  2. Actors (Stateful): Long-running services that maintain internal state. These are essentially distributed classes. They are ideal for parameter servers, model weights, or database connections.

Architectural Blueprint

The following diagram illustrates how the User Application interacts with the Ray Runtime, separating the Control Plane (metadata) from the Execution Plane (compute).

flowchart TD subgraph UserLayer ["User Application (RL Pipeline)"] App["RL Training Loop"] end subgraph RayRuntime ["Ray Distributed Execution Engine"] direction TB subgraph ControlPlane ["Control Plane (GCS)"] GCS_Store["Global Control Store (Metadata)"] ObjStore["Distributed Object Store (Shared Memory)"] ActorReg["Actor Registry"] end subgraph ExecutionPlane ["Execution Plane (Worker Nodes)"] direction LR TaskWorker["Task Worker (Stateless)"] ActorWorker["Actor Worker (Stateful)"] end end %% Data Flow for Tasks App -->|"remote_task(func)"| TaskWorker TaskWorker -->|"Compute Result"| ObjStore ObjStore -->|"ObjectRef (Future)"| App App -->|"ray.get(ref)"| ObjStore %% Data Flow for Actors App -->|"create_actor()"| ActorReg ActorReg -->|"Instantiate"| ActorWorker App -->|"RayActorHandle (Method Call)"| ActorWorker ActorWorker -->|"Update/Retrieve State"| ActorWorker ActorWorker -->|"Return Value"| App %% Internal Metadata Links TaskWorker -.->|"Register Result"| GCS_Store ActorWorker -.->|"Register Location"| GCS_Store %% RL Specific Mapping subgraph RL_Mapping ["RL Logic Mapping"] direction LR M1["simulate_environment()"] ---|"Implemented as"| TaskWorker M2["ParameterServer"] ---|"Implemented as"| ActorWorker end style ControlPlane fill:#f9f,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px style ExecutionPlane fill:#bbf,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px style RL_Mapping fill:#dfd,stroke:#333,stroke-dasharray: 5 5

How it Works: The Execution Flow

  1. Submission: The user defines a function as a Task or a class as an Actor.
  2. Distributed Scheduling: Instead of one master node deciding everything, Ray uses a distributed strategy to assign work to available resources instantly.
  3. State Management: The Global Control Store (GCS) keeps track of where actors live and where data is stored, but the actual data lives in a distributed shared-memory object store.
  4. The RL Loop:
    • Simulation: Parallel Tasks generate trajectories (rollouts).
    • Training: Trajectories are sent to an Actor (Parameter Server) to update model weights via SGD.
    • Serving: The updated weights are served back to the Tasks for the next iteration.

Implementation: Simulating Ray in Python

To truly understand the difference between Tasks and Actors, let's implement a simplified version of the Ray runtime using Python's multiprocessing.

PYTHON
import uuid
import time
import random
import concurrent.futures
from typing import Any, Dict, Callable
from dataclasses import dataclass
from multiprocessing import Manager

@dataclass
class ObjectRef:
    """A handle to a result that may not yet be computed (a Future)."""
    id: str

class RayRuntime:
    """Simplified simulation of the Ray Distributed Execution Engine."""
    def __init__(self, num_workers: int = 4):
        self._manager = Manager()
        self._object_store = self._manager.dict() 
        self._actor_registry = self._manager.dict()
        self._executor = concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=num_workers)
        print(f"[RayRuntime] Initialized with {num_workers} workers.")

    def remote_task(self, func: Callable, *args, **kwargs) -> ObjectRef:
        """Schedules a stateless TASK."""
        ref_id = str(uuid.uuid4())
        ref = ObjectRef(ref_id)
        future = self._executor.submit(self._execute_task, func, *args, **kwargs)
        future.add_done_callback(lambda f: self._object_store.update({ref_id: f.result()}))
        return ref

    def _execute_task(self, func, *args, **kwargs):
        return func(*args, **kwargs)

    def create_actor(self, actor_class, *args, **kwargs):
        """Instantiates a stateful ACTOR."""
        actor_id = str(uuid.uuid4())
        actor_instance = actor_class(*args, **kwargs)
        self._actor_registry[actor_id] = actor_instance
        return RayActorHandle(actor_id, self)

    def get(self, ref: ObjectRef) -> Any:
        """Blocking call to retrieve value from the object store."""
        while ref.id not in self._object_store:
            time.sleep(0.01)
        return self._object_store[ref.id]

class RayActorHandle:
    """Proxy handle to route calls to a specific remote Actor."""
    def __init__(self, actor_id: str, runtime: RayRuntime):
        self.actor_id = actor_id
        self.runtime = runtime

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            actor = self.runtime._actor_registry[self.actor_id]
            method = getattr(actor, name)
            return method(*args, **kwargs)
        return wrapper

# --- RL Pipeline Demonstration ---

class ParameterServer:
    """Stateful Actor: Maintains global model weights."""
    def __init__(self, lr=0.01):
        self.weights = 0.0 
        self.lr = lr

    def apply_gradients(self, grad):
        self.weights -= self.lr * grad
        return self.weights

    def get_weights(self):
        return self.weights

def simulate_environment(policy_weight: float, env_id: int):
    """Stateless Task: Simulates an environment rollout."""
    time.sleep(random.uniform(0.1, 0.3))
    gradient = (policy_weight - 10.0) * 1.0 # Target weight is 10.0
    print(f"[Task] Env {env_id} computed gradient: {gradient:.4f}")
    return gradient

if __name__ == '__main__':
    ray = RayRuntime(num_workers=4)
    ps = ray.create_actor(ParameterServer, lr=0.1)

    for epoch in range(3):
        print(f"\n--- Epoch {epoch} ---")
        current_weights = ps.get_weights()
        
        # Parallel Simulation (Tasks)
        task_refs = [ray.remote_task(simulate_environment, current_weights, i) for i in range(4)]
        
        # Collect and Update (Actor)
        gradients = [ray.get(ref) for ref in task_refs]
        avg_grad = sum(gradients) / len(gradients)
        new_weight = ps.apply_gradients(avg_grad)
        print(f"Updated Weight: {new_weight:.4f}")

Key Takeaways for Engineers

When to use Tasks vs. Actors?

Feature Tasks Actors
State Stateless Stateful
Lifecycle Short-lived (Ephemeral) Long-lived
Scaling Highly parallel (thousands) Limited by state management
Use Case Data processing, RL rollouts Model weights, DB connections

Why this matters for AI

The ability to mix these two primitives allows Ray to handle the entire ML lifecycle. You can use Tasks for the heavy lifting of data ingestion and simulation, and Actors for the coordination of training and the serving of the final model—all within a single, unified framework.

By decoupling the control plane from the execution plane, Ray ensures that as your AI models grow in complexity, your infrastructure doesn't become the bottleneck.