ServiceBase

class torchrl.services.ServiceBase

Base class for distributed service registries.

A service registry manages distributed actors/services that can be accessed across multiple workers. Common use cases include:

• Tokenizers shared across inference workers

• Replay buffers for distributed training

• Model registries for centralized model storage

• Metrics aggregators

The registry provides a dict-like interface for registering and accessing services by name.

abstract get(name: str) → Any

Get a service by name.

Retrieves a previously registered service. If the service was registered by another worker, this method will find it in the distributed registry.

Parameters:

name – Service identifier.

Returns:

The remote actor handle for the service.

Raises:

KeyError – If the service is not found.

abstract list() → list[str]

List all registered service names.

Returns:

List of service names currently registered in the cluster.

abstract register(name: str, service_factory: type, *args, **kwargs) → Any

Register a service factory and create the service actor.

This method registers a service with the given name and immediately creates the corresponding actor. The service becomes globally visible to all workers in the cluster.

Parameters:

• name – Unique identifier for the service. This name is used to retrieve the service later.

• service_factory – Class to instantiate as a remote actor.

• *args – Positional arguments to pass to the service constructor.

• **kwargs – Keyword arguments for both actor configuration and service constructor. Actor configuration options are backend-specific (e.g., num_cpus, num_gpus for Ray).

Returns:

The remote actor handle.

Raises:

ValueError – If a service with this name already exists.

abstract reset() → None

Reset the service registry.

This removes all registered services and cleans up associated resources. After calling reset(), the registry will be empty and all service actors will be terminated.

Warning

This is a destructive operation. All services will be terminated and any ongoing work will be interrupted.