Congjie He

h-index1
4papers
5citations

4 Papers

7.7LGOct 8, 2023Code
GEAR: A GPU-Centric Experience Replay System for Large Reinforcement Learning Models

Hanjing Wang, Man-Kit Sit, Congjie He et al.

This paper introduces a distributed, GPU-centric experience replay system, GEAR, designed to perform scalable reinforcement learning (RL) with large sequence models (such as transformers). With such models, existing systems such as Reverb face considerable bottlenecks in memory, computation, and communication. GEAR, however, optimizes memory efficiency by enabling the memory resources on GPU servers (including host memory and device memory) to manage trajectory data. Furthermore, it facilitates decentralized GPU devices to expedite various trajectory selection strategies, circumventing computational bottlenecks. GEAR is equipped with GPU kernels capable of collecting trajectories using zero-copy access to host memory, along with remote-directed-memory access over InfiniBand, improving communication efficiency. Cluster experiments have shown that GEAR can achieve performance levels up to 6x greater than Reverb when training state-of-the-art large RL models. GEAR is open-sourced at https://github.com/bigrl-team/gear.

16.4DCJun 19Code
BatchGen: An Architecture for Scalable and Efficient Batch Inference

Tairan Xu, Leyang Xue, Zhan Lu et al.

Batch inference has become a central mode of AI computation, yet existing inference engines still rely on execution models designed for interactive serving. When scaled to millions of sequences, batch workloads reveal two fundamental requirements: the ability to handle extreme inter- and intra-sequence load variation that emerges only at runtime, and the ability to sustain high utilization across large fleets of GPUs. Existing systems fail to meet these requirements, losing substantial fractions of achievable throughput. We introduce a new architectural foundation for batch inference: the sequence coroutine compute model, which represents each sequence as a fine-grained, event-driven coroutine. This model exposes expressive primitives that allow the runtime to reorganize work dynamically, enabling larger expert-level batches, mitigating stragglers, reallocating work across devices, and maintaining utilization even on cost-effective or memory-constrained GPUs. Building on this abstraction, we implement BatchGen, a production-ready system that uses the coroutine model at cluster scale. On a 128-GPU cluster, BatchGen reduces batch completion time by up to $2.3\times$, and on memory-constrained accelerators it outperforms the strongest offloading baseline by up to $9.6\times$. We will open-source BatchGen at https://github.com/batchgen-project/batchgen

8.2SEJun 17
JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

Tingzhu Bi, Xinrui Jiang, Xun Zhang et al.

Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

9.7DCMay 18, 2023Code
Quiver: Supporting GPUs for Low-Latency, High-Throughput GNN Serving with Workload Awareness

Zeyuan Tan, Xiulong Yuan, Congjie He et al.

Systems for serving inference requests on graph neural networks (GNN) must combine low latency with high throughout, but they face irregular computation due to skew in the number of sampled graph nodes and aggregated GNN features. This makes it challenging to exploit GPUs effectively: using GPUs to sample only a few graph nodes yields lower performance than CPU-based sampling; and aggregating many features exhibits high data movement costs between GPUs and CPUs. Therefore, current GNN serving systems use CPUs for graph sampling and feature aggregation, limiting throughput. We describe Quiver, a distributed GPU-based GNN serving system with low-latency and high-throughput. Quiver's key idea is to exploit workload metrics for predicting the irregular computation of GNN requests, and governing the use of GPUs for graph sampling and feature aggregation: (1) for graph sampling, Quiver calculates the probabilistic sampled graph size, a metric that predicts the degree of parallelism in graph sampling. Quiver uses this metric to assign sampling tasks to GPUs only when the performance gains surpass CPU-based sampling; and (2) for feature aggregation, Quiver relies on the feature access probability to decide which features to partition and replicate across a distributed GPU NUMA topology. We show that Quiver achieves up to 35 times lower latency with an 8 times higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art GNN approaches (DGL and PyG).