7,737 research outputs found
Sparse Allreduce: Efficient Scalable Communication for Power-Law Data
Many large datasets exhibit power-law statistics: The web graph, social
networks, text data, click through data etc. Their adjacency graphs are termed
natural graphs, and are known to be difficult to partition. As a consequence
most distributed algorithms on these graphs are communication intensive. Many
algorithms on natural graphs involve an Allreduce: a sum or average of
partitioned data which is then shared back to the cluster nodes. Examples
include PageRank, spectral partitioning, and many machine learning algorithms
including regression, factor (topic) models, and clustering. In this paper we
describe an efficient and scalable Allreduce primitive for power-law data. We
point out scaling problems with existing butterfly and round-robin networks for
Sparse Allreduce, and show that a hybrid approach improves on both.
Furthermore, we show that Sparse Allreduce stages should be nested instead of
cascaded (as in the dense case). And that the optimum throughput Allreduce
network should be a butterfly of heterogeneous degree where degree decreases
with depth into the network. Finally, a simple replication scheme is introduced
to deal with node failures. We present experiments showing significant
improvements over existing systems such as PowerGraph and Hadoop
Exploiting Data Representation for Fault Tolerance
We explore the link between data representation and soft errors in dot
products. We present an analytic model for the absolute error introduced should
a soft error corrupt a bit in an IEEE-754 floating-point number. We show how
this finding relates to the fundamental linear algebra concepts of
normalization and matrix equilibration. We present a case study illustrating
that the probability of experiencing a large error in a dot product is
minimized when both vectors are normalized. Furthermore, when data is
normalized we show that the absolute error is less than one or very large,
which allows us to detect large errors. We demonstrate how this finding can be
used by instrumenting the GMRES iterative solver. We count all possible errors
that can be introduced through faults in arithmetic in the computationally
intensive orthogonalization phase, and show that when scaling is used the
absolute error can be bounded above by one
A Unified Coded Deep Neural Network Training Strategy Based on Generalized PolyDot Codes for Matrix Multiplication
This paper has two contributions. First, we propose a novel coded matrix
multiplication technique called Generalized PolyDot codes that advances on
existing methods for coded matrix multiplication under storage and
communication constraints. This technique uses "garbage alignment," i.e.,
aligning computations in coded computing that are not a part of the desired
output. Generalized PolyDot codes bridge between Polynomial codes and MatDot
codes, trading off between recovery threshold and communication costs. Second,
we demonstrate that Generalized PolyDot can be used for training large Deep
Neural Networks (DNNs) on unreliable nodes prone to soft-errors. This requires
us to address three additional challenges: (i) prohibitively large overhead of
coding the weight matrices in each layer of the DNN at each iteration; (ii)
nonlinear operations during training, which are incompatible with linear
coding; and (iii) not assuming presence of an error-free master node, requiring
us to architect a fully decentralized implementation without any "single point
of failure." We allow all primary DNN training steps, namely, matrix
multiplication, nonlinear activation, Hadamard product, and update steps as
well as the encoding/decoding to be error-prone. We consider the case of
mini-batch size , as well as , leveraging coded matrix-vector
products, and matrix-matrix products respectively. The problem of DNN training
under soft-errors also motivates an interesting, probabilistic error model
under which a real number MDS code is shown to correct errors
with probability as compared to for the
more conventional, adversarial error model. We also demonstrate that our
proposed strategy can provide unbounded gains in error tolerance over a
competing replication strategy and a preliminary MDS-code-based strategy for
both these error models.Comment: Presented in part at the IEEE International Symposium on Information
Theory 2018 (Submission Date: Jan 12 2018); Currently under review at the
IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Improving Performance of Iterative Methods by Lossy Checkponting
Iterative methods are commonly used approaches to solve large, sparse linear
systems, which are fundamental operations for many modern scientific
simulations. When the large-scale iterative methods are running with a large
number of ranks in parallel, they have to checkpoint the dynamic variables
periodically in case of unavoidable fail-stop errors, requiring fast I/O
systems and large storage space. To this end, significantly reducing the
checkpointing overhead is critical to improving the overall performance of
iterative methods. Our contribution is fourfold. (1) We propose a novel lossy
checkpointing scheme that can significantly improve the checkpointing
performance of iterative methods by leveraging lossy compressors. (2) We
formulate a lossy checkpointing performance model and derive theoretically an
upper bound for the extra number of iterations caused by the distortion of data
in lossy checkpoints, in order to guarantee the performance improvement under
the lossy checkpointing scheme. (3) We analyze the impact of lossy
checkpointing (i.e., extra number of iterations caused by lossy checkpointing
files) for multiple types of iterative methods. (4)We evaluate the lossy
checkpointing scheme with optimal checkpointing intervals on a high-performance
computing environment with 2,048 cores, using a well-known scientific
computation package PETSc and a state-of-the-art checkpoint/restart toolkit.
Experiments show that our optimized lossy checkpointing scheme can
significantly reduce the fault tolerance overhead for iterative methods by
23%~70% compared with traditional checkpointing and 20%~58% compared with
lossless-compressed checkpointing, in the presence of system failures.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, HPDC'1
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