No Arabic abstract
Communication is a key bottleneck in distributed training. Recently, an emph{error-compensated} compression technology was particularly designed for the emph{centralized} learning and receives huge successes, by showing significant advantages over state-of-the-art compression based methods in saving the communication cost. Since the emph{decentralized} training has been witnessed to be superior to the traditional emph{centralized} training in the communication restricted scenario, therefore a natural question to ask is how to apply the error-compensated technology to the decentralized learning to further reduce the communication cost. However, a trivial extension of compression based centralized training algorithms does not exist for the decentralized scenario. key difference between centralized and decentralized training makes this extension extremely non-trivial. In this paper, we propose an elegant algorithmic design to employ error-compensated stochastic gradient descent for the decentralized scenario, named $texttt{DeepSqueeze}$. Both the theoretical analysis and the empirical study are provided to show the proposed $texttt{DeepSqueeze}$ algorithm outperforms the existing compression based decentralized learning algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to apply the error-compensated compression to the decentralized learning.
Decentralisation is one of the promises introduced by blockchain technologies: fair and secure interaction amongst peers with no dominant positions, single points of failure or censorship. Decentralisation, however, appears difficult to be formally defined, possibly a continuum property of systems that can be more or less decentralised, or can tend to decentralisation in their lifetime. In this paper we focus on decentralisation in quorum-based approaches to open (permissionless) consensus as illustrated in influential protocols such as the Ripple and Stellar protocols. Drawing from game theory and computational complexity, we establish limiting results concerning the decentralisation vs. safety trade-off in Ripple and Stellar, and we propose a novel methodology to formalise and quantitatively analyse decentralisation in this type of blockchains.
Error-bounded lossy compression is a critical technique for significantly reducing scientific data volumes. With ever-emerging heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) architecture, GPU-accelerated error-bounded compressors (such as cuSZ+ and cuZFP) have been developed. However, they suffer from either low performance or low compression ratios. To this end, we propose cuSZ+ to target both high compression ratios and throughputs. We identify that data sparsity and data smoothness are key factors for high compression throughputs. Our key contributions in this work are fourfold: (1) We propose an efficient compression workflow to adaptively perform run-length encoding and/or variable-length encoding. (2) We derive Lorenzo reconstruction in decompression as multidimensional partial-sum computation and propose a fine-grained Lorenzo reconstruction algorithm for GPU architectures. (3) We carefully optimize each of cuSZ+ kernels by leveraging state-of-the-art CUDA parallel primitives. (4) We evaluate cuSZ+ using seven real-world HPC application datasets on V100 and A100 GPUs. Experiments show cuSZ+ improves the compression throughputs and ratios by up to 18.4X and 5.3X, respectively, over cuSZ on the tested datasets.
Error-bounded lossy compression is becoming more and more important to todays extreme-scale HPC applications because of the ever-increasing volume of data generated because it has been widely used in in-situ visualization, data stream intensity reduction, storage reduction, I/O performance improvement, checkpoint/restart acceleration, memory footprint reduction, etc. Although many works have optimized ratio, quality, and performance for different error-bounded lossy compressors, there is none of the existing works attempting to systematically understand the impact of lossy compression errors on HPC application due to error propagation. In this paper, we propose and develop a lossy compression fault injection tool, called LCFI. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fault injection tool that helps both lossy compressor developers and users to systematically and comprehensively understand the impact of lossy compression errors on HPC programs. The contributions of this work are threefold: (1) We propose an efficient approach to inject lossy compression errors according to a statistical analysis of compression errors for different state-of-the-art compressors. (2) We build a fault injector which is highly applicable, customizable, easy-to-use in generating top-down comprehensive results, and demonstrate the use of LCFI. (3) We evaluate LCFI on four representative HPC benchmarks with different abstracted fault models and make several observations about error propagation and their impacts on program outputs.
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a flexible and powerful framework that is suitable for computationally expensive simulation-based applications and guarantees statistical convergence to the global optimum. While remaining as one of the most popular optimization methods, its capability is hindered by the size of data, the dimensionality of the considered problem, and the nature of sequential optimization. These scalability issues are intertwined with each other and must be tackled simultaneously. In this work, we propose the Scalable$^3$-BO framework, which employs sparse GP as the underlying surrogate model to scope with Big Data and is equipped with a random embedding to efficiently optimize high-dimensional problems with low effective dimensionality. The Scalable$^3$-BO framework is further leveraged with asynchronous parallelization feature, which fully exploits the computational resource on HPC within a computational budget. As a result, the proposed Scalable$^3$-BO framework is scalable in three independent perspectives: with respect to data size, dimensionality, and computational resource on HPC. The goal of this work is to push the frontiers of BO beyond its well-known scalability issues and minimize the wall-clock waiting time for optimizing high-dimensional computationally expensive applications. We demonstrate the capability of Scalable$^3$-BO with 1 million data points, 10,000-dimensional problems, with 20 concurrent workers in an HPC environment.
In this manuscript we propose two objective terms for neural image compression: a compression objective and a cycle loss. These terms are applied on the encoder output of an autoencoder and are used in combination with reconstruction losses. The compression objective encourages sparsity and low entropy in the activations. The cycle loss term represents the distortion between encoder outputs computed from the original image and from the reconstructed image (code-domain distortion). We train different autoencoders by using the compression objective in combination with different losses: a) MSE, b) MSE and MSSSIM, c) MSE, MS-SSIM and cycle loss. We observe that images encoded by these differently-trained autoencoders fall into different points of the perception-distortion curve (while having similar bit-rates). In particular, MSE-only training favors low image-domain distortion, whereas cycle loss training favors high perceptual quality.