Near-Optimal Straggler Mitigation for Distributed Gradient Methods

Modern learning algorithms use gradient descent updates to train inferential models that best explain data. Scaling these approaches to massive data sizes requires proper distributed gradient descent schemes where distributed worker nodes compute partial gradients based on their partial and local data sets, and send the results to a master node where all the computations are aggregated into a full gradient and the learning model is updated. However, a major performance bottleneck that arises is that some of the worker nodes may run slow. These nodes a.k.a. stragglers can significantly slow down computation as the slowest node may dictate the overall computational time. We propose a distributed computing scheme, called Batched Coupon's Collector (BCC) to alleviate the effect of stragglers in gradient methods. We prove that our BCC scheme is robust to a near optimal number of random stragglers. We also empirically demonstrate that our proposed BCC scheme reduces the run-time by up to 85.4% over Amazon EC2 clusters when compared with other straggler mitigation strategies. We also generalize the proposed BCC scheme to minimize the completion time when implementing gradient descent-based algorithms over heterogeneous worker nodes

Block-Diagonal and LT Codes for Distributed Computing With Straggling Servers

We propose two coded schemes for the distributed computing problem of multiplying a matrix by a set of vectors. The first scheme is based on partitioning the matrix into submatrices and applying maximum distance separable (MDS) codes to each submatrix. For this scheme, we prove that up to a given number of partitions the communication load and the computational delay (not including the encoding and decoding delay) are identical to those of the scheme recently proposed by Li et al., based on a single, long MDS code. However, due to the use of shorter MDS codes, our scheme yields a significantly lower overall computational delay when the delay incurred by encoding and decoding is also considered. We further propose a second coded scheme based on Luby Transform (LT) codes under inactivation decoding. Interestingly, LT codes may reduce the delay over the partitioned scheme at the expense of an increased communication load. We also consider distributed computing under a deadline and show numerically that the proposed schemes outperform other schemes in the literature, with the LT code-based scheme yielding the best performance for the scenarios considered.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication