Providing Transaction Class-Based QoS in In-Memory Data Grids via Machine Learning

Elastic architectures and the ”pay-as-you-go” resource pricing model offered by many cloud infrastructure providers may seem the right choice for companies dealing with data centric applications characterized by high variable workload. In such a context, in-memory transactional data grids have demonstrated to be particularly suited for exploiting advantages provided by elastic computing platforms, mainly thanks to their ability to be dynamically (re-)sized and tuned. Anyway, when specific QoS requirements have to be met, this kind of architectures have revealed to be complex to be managed by humans. Particularly, their management is a very complex task without the stand of mechanisms supporting run-time automatic sizing/tuning of the data platform and the underlying (virtual) hardware resources provided by the cloud. In this paper, we present a neural network-based architecture where the system is constantly and automatically re-configured, particularly in terms of computing resources

DeepPicar: A Low-cost Deep Neural Network-based Autonomous Car

We present DeepPicar, a low-cost deep neural network based autonomous car platform. DeepPicar is a small scale replication of a real self-driving car called DAVE-2 by NVIDIA. DAVE-2 uses a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), which takes images from a front-facing camera as input and produces car steering angles as output. DeepPicar uses the same network architecture---9 layers, 27 million connections and 250K parameters---and can drive itself in real-time using a web camera and a Raspberry Pi 3 quad-core platform. Using DeepPicar, we analyze the Pi 3's computing capabilities to support end-to-end deep learning based real-time control of autonomous vehicles. We also systematically compare other contemporary embedded computing platforms using the DeepPicar's CNN-based real-time control workload. We find that all tested platforms, including the Pi 3, are capable of supporting the CNN-based real-time control, from 20 Hz up to 100 Hz, depending on hardware platform. However, we find that shared resource contention remains an important issue that must be considered in applying CNN models on shared memory based embedded computing platforms; we observe up to 11.6X execution time increase in the CNN based control loop due to shared resource contention. To protect the CNN workload, we also evaluate state-of-the-art cache partitioning and memory bandwidth throttling techniques on the Pi 3. We find that cache partitioning is ineffective, while memory bandwidth throttling is an effective solution.Comment: To be published as a conference paper at RTCSA 201

Persistence pays off: Paying Attention to What the LSTM Gating Mechanism Persists

Language Models (LMs) are important components in several Natural Language Processing systems. Recurrent Neural Network LMs composed of LSTM units, especially those augmented with an external memory, have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, these models still struggle to process long sequences which are more likely to contain long-distance dependencies because of information fading and a bias towards more recent information. In this paper we demonstrate an effective mechanism for retrieving information in a memory augmented LSTM LM based on attending to information in memory in proportion to the number of timesteps the LSTM gating mechanism persisted the information

TrIMS: Transparent and Isolated Model Sharing for Low Latency Deep LearningInference in Function as a Service Environments

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become core computation components within low latency Function as a Service (FaaS) prediction pipelines: including image recognition, object detection, natural language processing, speech synthesis, and personalized recommendation pipelines. Cloud computing, as the de-facto backbone of modern computing infrastructure for both enterprise and consumer applications, has to be able to handle user-defined pipelines of diverse DNN inference workloads while maintaining isolation and latency guarantees, and minimizing resource waste. The current solution for guaranteeing isolation within FaaS is suboptimal -- suffering from "cold start" latency. A major cause of such inefficiency is the need to move large amount of model data within and across servers. We propose TrIMS as a novel solution to address these issues. Our proposed solution consists of a persistent model store across the GPU, CPU, local storage, and cloud storage hierarchy, an efficient resource management layer that provides isolation, and a succinct set of application APIs and container technologies for easy and transparent integration with FaaS, Deep Learning (DL) frameworks, and user code. We demonstrate our solution by interfacing TrIMS with the Apache MXNet framework and demonstrate up to 24x speedup in latency for image classification models and up to 210x speedup for large models. We achieve up to 8x system throughput improvement.Comment: In Proceedings CLOUD 201