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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
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