Straggler Mitigation
Contact: Aaron Harlap
Distributed executions of iterative machine learning (ML) algorithms can suffer significant performance losses due to stragglers. The regular (e.g., per iteration) barriers used in the traditional BSP approach cause every transient slowdown of any worker thread to delay all others. This project describes a scalable, efficient solution to the straggler problem for this important class of ML algorithms, combining a more flexible synchronization model with dynamic peer-to-peer re-assignment of work among workers. Experiments with real straggler behavior observed on Amazon EC2, as well as injected straggler behavior stress tests, confirm the significance of the problem and the effectiveness of the solution, as implemented in a framework called FlexRR. Using FlexRR, we consistently observe near-ideal run-times (relative to no performance jitter) across all real and injected straggler behaviors tested.
Matrix Factorization Running on two classes of AWS EC2 Machines
LDA Running on two classes of AWS EC2 Machines
FlexRR resolving emulated straggler patterns
People
FACULTY
Greg GangerPhil Gibbons
Garth Gibson
Eric Xing
GRAD STUDENTS
Publications
- Solving the Straggler Problem for Iterative Convergent Parallel ML
Aaron Harlap, Henggang Cui, Wei Dai, Jinliang Wei Gregory R. Ganger, Phillip B. Gibbons, Garth A. Gibson, Eric P. Xing. Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Laboratory Technical Report CMU-PDL-15-102, April 2015.
Abstract / PDF [532KB]
Acknowledgements
We thank the members and companies of the PDL Consortium: Alibaba Group, Amazon, Datrium, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Ltd., Intel Corporation, IBM, Micron, Microsoft Research, NetApp, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Salesforce, Samsung Semiconductor Inc., Seagate Technology, and Two Sigma for their interest, insights, feedback, and support.