Beyond data and model parallelism for deep neural networks

Beyond data and model parallelism for deep neural networks Jia et al., SysML'2019 I’m guessing the authors of this paper were spared some of the XML excesses of the late nineties and early noughties, since they have no qualms putting SOAP at the core of their work! To me that means the "simple" object access … Continue reading Beyond data and model parallelism for deep neural networks

PyTorch-BigGraph: a large-scale graph embedding system

PyTorch-BigGraph: a large-scale graph embedding system Lerer et al., SysML'19 We looked at graph neural networks earlier this year, which operate directly over a graph structure. Via graph autoencoders or other means, another approach is to learn embeddings for the nodes in the graph, and then use these embeddings as inputs into a (regular) neural … Continue reading PyTorch-BigGraph: a large-scale graph embedding system

Towards federated learning at scale: system design

Towards federated learning at scale: system design Bonawitz et al., SysML 2019 This is a high level paper describing Google’s production system for federated learning. One of the most interesting things to me here is simply to know that Google are working on this, have a first version in production working with tens of millions … Continue reading Towards federated learning at scale: system design

Continuous integration of machine learning models with ease.ml/ci

Continuous integration of machine learning models with ease.ml/ci: towards a rigorous yet practical treatment Renggli et al., SysML'19 Developing machine learning models is no different from developing traditional software, in the sense that it is also a full life cycle involving design, implementation, tuning, testing, and deployment. As machine learning models are used in more … Continue reading Continuous integration of machine learning models with ease.ml/ci

A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices

A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices Hu et al., ASPLOS'19 I’ve chosen another energy-related paper to end the week, addressing a problem many people can relate to: apps that drain your battery. LeaseOS borrows the concept of a lease from distributed systems, but with a rather nice twist, and is able … Continue reading A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices

CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment

CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment Davis et al., ASPLOS'19 Last week we saw the benefits of rethinking memory and pointer models at the hardware level when it came to object storage and compression (Zippads). CHERI also rethinks the way that pointers and memory work, but … Continue reading CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment

Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy

Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy Tsai & Sanchez, ASPLOS'19 Last time out we saw how Google have been able to save millions of dollars though memory compression enabled via zswap. One of the important attributes of their design was easy and rapid deployment across an existing fleet. Today’s paper introduces … Continue reading Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy

Software-defined far memory in warehouse scale computers

Software-defined far memory in warehouse-scale computers Lagar-Cavilla et al., ASPLOS'19 Memory (DRAM) remains comparatively expensive, while in-memory computing demands are growing rapidly. This makes memory a critical factor in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of large compute clusters, or as Google like to call them "Warehouse-scale computers (WSCs)." This paper describes a "far memory" … Continue reading Software-defined far memory in warehouse scale computers