Cyclades: Conflict-free Asynchronous Machine Learning

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NIPS 2016)

Bibtex Metadata Paper Reviews Supplemental

Authors

Xinghao Pan, Maximilian Lam, Stephen Tu, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Ce Zhang, Michael I. Jordan, Kannan Ramchandran, Christopher Ré

Abstract

We present Cyclades, a general framework for parallelizing stochastic optimization algorithms in a shared memory setting. Cyclades is asynchronous during model updates, and requires no memory locking mechanisms, similar to Hogwild!-type algorithms. Unlike Hogwild!, Cyclades introduces no conflicts during parallel execution, and offers a black-box analysis for provable speedups across a large family of algorithms. Due to its inherent cache locality and conflict-free nature, our multi-core implementation of Cyclades consistently outperforms Hogwild!-type algorithms on sufficiently sparse datasets, leading to up to 40% speedup gains compared to Hogwild!, and up to 5\times gains over asynchronous implementations of variance reduction algorithms.