Dimitrije Jankov

Yuxin Tang, Zhimin Ding, Dimitrije Jankov et al.

The relational data model was designed to facilitate large-scale data management and analytics. We consider the problem of how to differentiate computations expressed relationally. We show experimentally that a relational engine running an auto-differentiated relational algorithm can easily scale to very large datasets, and is competitive with state-of-the-art, special-purpose systems for large-scale distributed machine learning.

Binhang Yuan, Dimitrije Jankov, Jia Zou et al.

We consider the question: what is the abstraction that should be implemented by the computational engine of a machine learning system? Current machine learning systems typically push whole tensors through a series of compute kernels such as matrix multiplications or activation functions, where each kernel runs on an AI accelerator (ASIC) such as a GPU. This implementation abstraction provides little built-in support for ML systems to scale past a single machine, or for handling large models with matrices or tensors that do not easily fit into the RAM of an ASIC. In this paper, we present an alternative implementation abstraction called the tensor relational algebra (TRA). The TRA is a set-based algebra based on the relational algebra. Expressions in the TRA operate over binary tensor relations, where keys are multi-dimensional arrays and values are tensors. The TRA is easily executed with high efficiency in a parallel or distributed environment, and amenable to automatic optimization. Our empirical study shows that the optimized TRA-based back-end can significantly outperform alternatives for running ML workflows in distributed clusters.

Dimitrije Jankov, Shangyu Luo, Binhang Yuan et al.

A number of popular systems, most notably Google's TensorFlow, have been implemented from the ground up to support machine learning tasks. We consider how to make a very small set of changes to a modern relational database management system (RDBMS) to make it suitable for distributed learning computations. Changes include adding better support for recursion, and optimization and execution of very large compute plans. We also show that there are key advantages to using an RDBMS as a machine learning platform. In particular, learning based on a database management system allows for trivial scaling to large data sets and especially large models, where different computational units operate on different parts of a model that may be too large to fit into RAM.