High-Performance Distributed ML at Scale through Parameter Server Consistency Models

As Machine Learning (ML) applications increase in data size and model complexity, practitioners turn to distributed clusters to satisfy the increased computational and memory demands. Unfortunately, effective use of clusters for ML requires considerable expertise in writing distributed code, while highly-abstracted frameworks like Hadoop have not, in practice, approached the performance seen in specialized ML implementations. The recent Parameter Server (PS) paradigm is a middle ground between these extremes, allowing easy conversion of single-machine parallel ML applications into distributed ones, while maintaining high throughput through relaxed "consistency models" that allow inconsistent parameter reads. However, due to insufficient theoretical study, it is not clear which of these consistency models can really ensure correct ML algorithm output; at the same time, there remain many theoretically-motivated but undiscovered opportunities to maximize computational throughput. Motivated by this challenge, we study both the theoretical guarantees and empirical behavior of iterative-convergent ML algorithms in existing PS consistency models. We then use the gleaned insights to improve a consistency model using an "eager" PS communication mechanism, and implement it as a new PS system that enables ML algorithms to reach their solution more quickly.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

DBS: Dynamic Batch Size For Distributed Deep Neural Network Training

Synchronous strategies with data parallelism, such as the Synchronous StochasticGradient Descent (S-SGD) and the model averaging methods, are widely utilizedin distributed training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), largely owing to itseasy implementation yet promising performance. Particularly, each worker ofthe cluster hosts a copy of the DNN and an evenly divided share of the datasetwith the fixed mini-batch size, to keep the training of DNNs convergence. In thestrategies, the workers with different computational capability, need to wait foreach other because of the synchronization and delays in network transmission,which will inevitably result in the high-performance workers wasting computation.Consequently, the utilization of the cluster is relatively low. To alleviate thisissue, we propose the Dynamic Batch Size (DBS) strategy for the distributedtraining of DNNs. Specifically, the performance of each worker is evaluatedfirst based on the fact in the previous epoch, and then the batch size and datasetpartition are dynamically adjusted in consideration of the current performanceof the worker, thereby improving the utilization of the cluster. To verify theeffectiveness of the proposed strategy, extensive experiments have been conducted,and the experimental results indicate that the proposed strategy can fully utilizethe performance of the cluster, reduce the training time, and have good robustnesswith disturbance by irrelevant tasks. Furthermore, rigorous theoretical analysis hasalso been provided to prove the convergence of the proposed strategy.Comment: The latest version of this article has been accepted by IEEE TETC

AI Technical Considerations:Data Storage, Cloud usage and AI Pipeline

Artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning, requires vast amounts of data for training, testing, and validation. Collecting these data and the corresponding annotations requires the implementation of imaging biobanks that provide access to these data in a standardized way. This requires careful design and implementation based on the current standards and guidelines and complying with the current legal restrictions. However, the realization of proper imaging data collections is not sufficient to train, validate and deploy AI as resource demands are high and require a careful hybrid implementation of AI pipelines both on-premise and in the cloud. This chapter aims to help the reader when technical considerations have to be made about the AI environment by providing a technical background of different concepts and implementation aspects involved in data storage, cloud usage, and AI pipelines