Chita R. Das

Aakash Sharma, Vivek M. Bhasi, Sonali Singh et al.

We aim to resolve this problem by introducing a comprehensive distributed deep learning (DDL) profiler, which can determine the various execution "stalls" that DDL suffers from while running on a public cloud. We have implemented the profiler by extending prior work to additionally estimate two types of communication stalls - interconnect and network stalls. We train popular DNN models using the profiler to characterize various AWS GPU instances and list their advantages and shortcomings for users to make an informed decision. We observe that the more expensive GPU instances may not be the most performant for all DNN models and AWS may sub-optimally allocate hardware interconnect resources. Specifically, the intra-machine interconnect can introduce communication overheads up to 90% of DNN training time and network-connected instances can suffer from up to 5x slowdown compared to training on a single instance. Further, we model the impact of DNN macroscopic features such as the number of layers and the number of gradients on communication stalls. Finally, we propose a measurement-based recommendation model for users to lower their public cloud monetary costs for DDL, given a time budget.

Cyan Subhra Mishra, Deeksha Chaudhary, Jack Sampson et al.

The deployment of Deep Neural Networks in energy-constrained environments, such as Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks, presents unique challenges, primarily due to the intermittent nature of power availability. To address these challenges, this study introduces and evaluates a novel training methodology tailored for DNNs operating within such contexts. In particular, we propose a dynamic dropout technique that adapts to both the architecture of the device and the variability in energy availability inherent in energy harvesting scenarios. Our proposed approach leverages a device model that incorporates specific parameters of the network architecture and the energy harvesting profile to optimize dropout rates dynamically during the training phase. By modulating the network's training process based on predicted energy availability, our method not only conserves energy but also ensures sustained learning and inference capabilities under power constraints. Our preliminary results demonstrate that this strategy provides 6 to 22 percent accuracy improvements compared to the state of the art with less than 5 percent additional compute. This paper details the development of the device model, describes the integration of energy profiles with intermittency aware dropout and quantization algorithms, and presents a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach using real-world energy harvesting data.

Aakash Sharma, Vivek M. Bhasi, Sonali Singh et al.

We propose a novel GPU-cluster scheduler for distributed DL (DDL) workloads that enables proximity based consolidation of GPU resources based on the DDL jobs' sensitivities to the anticipated communication-network delays. Our scheduler consists of three major components: (i) a classical delay scheduling algorithm to facilitate job placement and consolidation; (ii) a network-sensitive job preemption strategy; and (iii) an "auto-tuner" mechanism to optimize delay timers for effective delay scheduling. Additionally, to enable a cost-effective methodology for large-scale experiments, we develop a data-driven DDL cluster simulation platform. Employing the simulation platform we compare against several state-of-the-art alternatives on real-world workload traces to demonstrate the benefits of our design. Our scheduler can provide improvement of up to 69% in end-to-end Makespan for training all jobs compared to the prevailing consolidation-based scheduling methods, while reducing the average job completion time by up to 83% and minimizing the communication overheads by up to 98% under congested networking conditions.

Rishabh Jain, Vivek M. Bhasi, Adwait Jog et al.

Personalized recommendation is a ubiquitous application on the internet, with many industries and hyperscalers extensively leveraging Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) for their personalization needs (like ad serving or movie suggestions). With growing model and dataset sizes pushing computation and memory requirements, GPUs are being increasingly preferred for executing DLRM inference. However, serving newer DLRMs, while meeting acceptable latencies, continues to remain challenging, making traditional deployments increasingly more GPU-hungry, resulting in higher inference serving costs. In this paper, we show that the embedding stage continues to be the primary bottleneck in the GPU inference pipeline, leading up to a 3.2x embedding-only performance slowdown. To thoroughly grasp the problem, we conduct a detailed microarchitecture characterization and highlight the presence of low occupancy in the standard embedding kernels. By leveraging direct compiler optimizations, we achieve optimal occupancy, pushing the performance by up to 53%. Yet, long memory latency stalls continue to exist. To tackle this challenge, we propose specialized plug-and-play-based software prefetching and L2 pinning techniques, which help in hiding and decreasing the latencies. Further, we propose combining them, as they complement each other. Experimental evaluations using A100 GPUs with large models and datasets show that our proposed techniques improve performance by up to 103% for the embedding stage, and up to 77% for the overall DLRM inference pipeline.

Anup Sarma, Sonali Singh, Huaipan Jiang et al.

Machine/deep-learning (ML/DL) based techniques are emerging as a driving force behind many cutting-edge technologies, achieving high accuracy on computer vision workloads such as image classification and object detection. However, training these models involving large parameters is both time-consuming and energy-hogging. In this regard, several prior works have advocated for sparsity to speed up the of DL training and more so, the inference phase. This work begins with the observation that during training, sparsity in the forward and backward passes are correlated. In that context, we investigate two types of sparsity (input and output type) inherent in gradient descent-based optimization algorithms and propose a hardware micro-architecture to leverage the same. Our experimental results use five state-of-the-art CNN models on the Imagenet dataset, and show back propagation speedups in the range of 1.69$\times$ to 5.43$\times$, compared to the dense baseline execution. By exploiting sparsity in both the forward and backward passes, speedup improvements range from 1.68$\times$ to 3.30$\times$ over the sparsity-agnostic baseline execution. Our work also achieves significant reduction in training iteration time over several previously proposed dense as well as sparse accelerator based platforms, in addition to achieving order of magnitude energy efficiency improvements over GPU based execution.

Anup Sarma, Sonali Singh, Huaipan Jiang et al.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), more specifically their Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) variants, have been widely used as a deep learning tool for tackling sequence-based learning tasks in text and speech. Training of such LSTM applications is computationally intensive due to the recurrent nature of hidden state computation that repeats for each time step. While sparsity in Deep Neural Nets has been widely seen as an opportunity for reducing computation time in both training and inference phases, the usage of non-ReLU activation in LSTM RNNs renders the opportunities for such dynamic sparsity associated with neuron activation and gradient values to be limited or non-existent. In this work, we identify dropout induced sparsity for LSTMs as a suitable mode of computation reduction. Dropout is a widely used regularization mechanism, which randomly drops computed neuron values during each iteration of training. We propose to structure dropout patterns, by dropping out the same set of physical neurons within a batch, resulting in column (row) level hidden state sparsity, which are well amenable to computation reduction at run-time in general-purpose SIMD hardware as well as systolic arrays. We conduct our experiments for three representative NLP tasks: language modelling on the PTB dataset, OpenNMT based machine translation using the IWSLT De-En and En-Vi datasets, and named entity recognition sequence labelling using the CoNLL-2003 shared task. We demonstrate that our proposed approach can be used to translate dropout-based computation reduction into reduced training time, with improvement ranging from 1.23x to 1.64x, without sacrificing the target metric.

Jashwant Raj Gunasekaran, Cyan Subhra Mishra, Prashanth Thinakaran et al.

With a growing demand for adopting ML models for a varietyof application services, it is vital that the frameworks servingthese models are capable of delivering highly accurate predic-tions with minimal latency along with reduced deploymentcosts in a public cloud environment. Despite high latency,prior works in this domain are crucially limited by the accu-racy offered by individual models. Intuitively, model ensem-bling can address the accuracy gap by intelligently combiningdifferent models in parallel. However, selecting the appro-priate models dynamically at runtime to meet the desiredaccuracy with low latency at minimal deployment cost is anontrivial problem. Towards this, we proposeCocktail, a costeffective ensembling-based model serving framework.Cock-tailcomprises of two key components: (i) a dynamic modelselection framework, which reduces the number of modelsin the ensemble, while satisfying the accuracy and latencyrequirements; (ii) an adaptive resource management (RM)framework that employs a distributed proactive autoscalingpolicy combined with importance sampling, to efficiently allo-cate resources for the models. The RM framework leveragestransient virtual machine (VM) instances to reduce the de-ployment cost in a public cloud. A prototype implementationofCocktailon the AWS EC2 platform and exhaustive evalua-tions using a variety of workloads demonstrate thatCocktailcan reduce deployment cost by 1.45x, while providing 2xreduction in latency and satisfying the target accuracy for upto 96% of the requests, when compared to state-of-the-artmodel-serving frameworks.