Gianluca Mittone

Gianluca Mittone, Nicolò Tonci, Robert Birke et al.

Decentralised Machine Learning (DML) enables collaborative machine learning without centralised input data. Federated Learning (FL) and Edge Inference are examples of DML. While tools for DML (especially FL) are starting to flourish, many are not flexible and portable enough to experiment with novel processors (e.g., RISC-V), non-fully connected network topologies, and asynchronous collaboration schemes. We overcome these limitations via a domain-specific language allowing us to map DML schemes to an underlying middleware, i.e. the FastFlow parallel programming library. We experiment with it by generating different working DML schemes on x86-64 and ARM platforms and an emerging RISC-V one. We characterise the performance and energy efficiency of the presented schemes and systems. As a byproduct, we introduce a RISC-V porting of the PyTorch framework, the first publicly available to our knowledge.

Gianluca Mittone, Filip Svoboda, Marco Aldinucci et al.

Aggregating pharmaceutical data in the drug-target interaction (DTI) domain has the potential to deliver life-saving breakthroughs. It is, however, notoriously difficult due to regulatory constraints and commercial interests. This work proposes the application of federated learning, which we argue to be reconcilable with the industry's constraints, as it does not require sharing of any information that would reveal the entities' data or any other high-level summary of it. When used on a representative GraphDTA model and the KIBA dataset it achieves up to 15% improved performance relative to the best available non-privacy preserving alternative. Our extensive battery of experiments shows that, unlike in other domains, the non-IID data distribution in the DTI datasets does not deteriorate FL performance. Additionally, we identify a material trade-off between the benefits of adding new data, and the cost of adding more clients.

Gianluca Mittone, Walter Riviera, Iacopo Colonnelli et al.

Since its debut in 2016, Federated Learning (FL) has been tied to the inner workings of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). On the one hand, this allowed its development and widespread use as DNNs proliferated. On the other hand, it neglected all those scenarios in which using DNNs is not possible or advantageous. The fact that most current FL frameworks only allow training DNNs reinforces this problem. To address the lack of FL solutions for non-DNN-based use cases, we propose MAFL (Model-Agnostic Federated Learning). MAFL marries a model-agnostic FL algorithm, AdaBoost.F, with an open industry-grade FL framework: Intel OpenFL. MAFL is the first FL system not tied to any specific type of machine learning model, allowing exploration of FL scenarios beyond DNNs and trees. We test MAFL from multiple points of view, assessing its correctness, flexibility and scaling properties up to 64 nodes. We optimised the base software achieving a 5.5x speedup on a standard FL scenario. MAFL is compatible with x86-64, ARM-v8, Power and RISC-V.

Nicola Bena, Claudia Diamantini, Michela Natilli et al.

The proceedings of Workshop Scientific HPC in the pre-Exascale era (SHPC), held in Pisa, Italy, September 18, 2024, are part of 3rd Italian Conference on Big Data and Data Science (ITADATA2024) proceedings (arXiv: 2503.14937). The main objective of SHPC workshop was to discuss how the current most critical questions in HPC emerge in astrophysics, cosmology, and other scientific contexts and experiments. In particular, SHPC workshop focused on: $\bullet$ Scientific (mainly in astrophysical and medical fields) applications toward (pre-)Exascale computing $\bullet$ Performance portability $\bullet$ Green computing $\bullet$ Machine learning $\bullet$ Big Data management $\bullet$ Programming on heterogeneous architectures $\bullet$ Programming on accelerators $\bullet$ I/O techniques