4,954 research outputs found
Dynamic Parameter Allocation in Parameter Servers
To keep up with increasing dataset sizes and model complexity, distributed
training has become a necessity for large machine learning tasks. Parameter
servers ease the implementation of distributed parameter management---a key
concern in distributed training---, but can induce severe communication
overhead. To reduce communication overhead, distributed machine learning
algorithms use techniques to increase parameter access locality (PAL),
achieving up to linear speed-ups. We found that existing parameter servers
provide only limited support for PAL techniques, however, and therefore prevent
efficient training. In this paper, we explore whether and to what extent PAL
techniques can be supported, and whether such support is beneficial. We propose
to integrate dynamic parameter allocation into parameter servers, describe an
efficient implementation of such a parameter server called Lapse, and
experimentally compare its performance to existing parameter servers across a
number of machine learning tasks. We found that Lapse provides near-linear
scaling and can be orders of magnitude faster than existing parameter servers
GraphVite: A High-Performance CPU-GPU Hybrid System for Node Embedding
Learning continuous representations of nodes is attracting growing interest
in both academia and industry recently, due to their simplicity and
effectiveness in a variety of applications. Most of existing node embedding
algorithms and systems are capable of processing networks with hundreds of
thousands or a few millions of nodes. However, how to scale them to networks
that have tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of nodes remains a
challenging problem. In this paper, we propose GraphVite, a high-performance
CPU-GPU hybrid system for training node embeddings, by co-optimizing the
algorithm and the system. On the CPU end, augmented edge samples are parallelly
generated by random walks in an online fashion on the network, and serve as the
training data. On the GPU end, a novel parallel negative sampling is proposed
to leverage multiple GPUs to train node embeddings simultaneously, without much
data transfer and synchronization. Moreover, an efficient collaboration
strategy is proposed to further reduce the synchronization cost between CPUs
and GPUs. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that GraphVite is
super efficient. It takes only about one minute for a network with 1 million
nodes and 5 million edges on a single machine with 4 GPUs, and takes around 20
hours for a network with 66 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges. Compared to
the current fastest system, GraphVite is about 50 times faster without any
sacrifice on performance.Comment: accepted at WWW 201
Towards Efficient Abstractions for Concurrent Consensus
Consensus is an often occurring problem in concurrent and distributed
programming. We present a programming language with simple semantics and
build-in support for consensus in the form of communicating transactions. We
motivate the need for such a construct with a characteristic example of
generalized consensus which can be naturally encoded in our language. We then
focus on the challenges in achieving an implementation that can efficiently run
such programs. We setup an architecture to evaluate different implementation
alternatives and use it to experimentally evaluate runtime heuristics. This is
the basis for a research project on realistic programming language support for
consensus.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, symposium: TFP 201
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