Neil Agarwal

Arthi Padmanabhan, Neil Agarwal, Anand Iyer et al.

Video analytics pipelines have steadily shifted to edge deployments to reduce bandwidth overheads and privacy violations, but in doing so, face an ever-growing resource tension. Most notably, edge-box GPUs lack the memory needed to concurrently house the growing number of (increasingly complex) models for real-time inference. Unfortunately, existing solutions that rely on time/space sharing of GPU resources are insufficient as the required swapping delays result in unacceptable frame drops and accuracy violations. We present model merging, a new memory management technique that exploits architectural similarities between edge vision models by judiciously sharing their layers (including weights) to reduce workload memory costs and swapping delays. Our system, GEMEL, efficiently integrates merging into existing pipelines by (1) leveraging several guiding observations about per-model memory usage and inter-layer dependencies to quickly identify fruitful and accuracy-preserving merging configurations, and (2) altering edge inference schedules to maximize merging benefits. Experiments across diverse workloads reveal that GEMEL reduces memory usage by up to 60.7%, and improves overall accuracy by 8-39% relative to time/space sharing alone.

Neil Agarwal, Ravi Netravali

Commercial retrospective video analytics platforms have increasingly adopted general interfaces to support the custom queries and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that different applications require. However, existing optimizations were designed for settings where CNNs were platform- (not user-) determined, and fail to meet at least one of the following key platform goals when that condition is violated: reliable accuracy, low latency, and minimal wasted work. We present Boggart, a system that simultaneously meets all three goals while supporting the generality that today's platforms seek. Prior to queries being issued, Boggart carefully employs traditional computer vision algorithms to generate indices that are imprecise, but are fundamentally comprehensive across different CNNs/queries. For each issued query, Boggart employs new techniques to quickly characterize the imprecision of its index, and sparingly run CNNs (and propagate the results to other frames) in a way that bounds accuracy drops. Our results highlight that Boggart's improved generality comes at low cost, with speedups that match (and most often, exceed) prior, model-specific approaches.