No Arabic abstract
Personalized PageRank (PPR) is a graph algorithm that evaluates the importance of the surrounding nodes from a source node. Widely used in social network related applications such as recommender systems, PPR requires real-time responses (latency) for a better user experience. Existing works either focus on algorithmic optimization for improving precision while neglecting hardware implementations or focus on distributed global graph processing on large-scale systems for improving throughput rather than response time. Optimizing low-latency local PPR algorithm with a tight memory budget on edge devices remains unexplored. In this work, we propose a memory-efficient, low-latency PPR solution, namely MeLoPPR, with largely reduced memory requirement and a flexible trade-off between latency and precision. MeLoPPR is composed of stage decomposition and linear decomposition and exploits the node score sparsity: Through stage and linear decomposition, MeLoPPR breaks the computation on a large graph into a set of smaller sub-graphs, that significantly saves the computation memory; Through sparsity exploitation, MeLoPPR selectively chooses the sub-graphs that contribute the most to the precision to reduce the required computation. In addition, through software/hardware co-design, we propose a hardware implementation on a hybrid CPU and FPGA accelerating platform, that further speeds up the sub-graph computation. We evaluate the proposed MeLoPPR on memory-constrained devices including a personal laptop and Xilinx Kintex-7 KC705 FPGA using six real-world graphs. First, MeLoPPR demonstrates significant memory saving by 1.5x to 13.4x on CPU and 73x to 8699x on FPGA. Second, MeLoPPR allows flexible trade-offs between precision and execution time: when the precision is 80%, the speedup on CPU is up to 15x and up to 707x on FPGA; when the precision is around 90%, the speedup is up to 70x on FPGA.
Important workloads, such as machine learning and graph analytics applications, heavily involve sparse linear algebra operations. These operations use sparse matrix compression as an effective means to avoid storing zeros and performing unnecessary computation on zero elements. However, compression techniques like Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) that are widely used today introduce significant instruction overhead and expensive pointer-chasing operations to discover the positions of the non-zero elements. In this paper, we identify the discovery of the positions (i.e., indexing) of non-zero elements as a key bottleneck in sparse matrix-based workloads, which greatly reduces the benefits of compression. We propose SMASH, a hardware-software cooperative mechanism that enables highly-efficient indexing and storage of sparse matrices. The key idea of SMASH is to explicitly enable the hardware to recognize and exploit sparsity in data. To this end, we devise a novel software encoding based on a hierarchy of bitmaps. This encoding can be used to efficiently compress any sparse matrix, regardless of the extent and structure of sparsity. At the same time, the bitmap encoding can be directly interpreted by the hardware. We design a lightweight hardware unit, the Bitmap Management Unit (BMU), that buffers and scans the bitmap hierarchy to perform highly-efficient indexing of sparse matrices. SMASH exposes an expressive and rich ISA to communicate with the BMU, which enables its use in accelerating any sparse matrix computation. We demonstrate the benefits of SMASH on four use cases that include sparse matrix kernels and graph analytics applications.
Memory disaggregation has attracted great attention recently because of its benefits in efficient memory utilization and ease of management. So far, memory disaggregation research has all taken one of two approaches, building/emulating memory nodes with either regular servers or raw memory devices with no processing power. The former incurs higher monetary cost and face tail latency and scalability limitations, while the latter introduce performance, security, and management problems. Server-based memory nodes and memory nodes with no processing power are two extreme approaches. We seek a sweet spot in the middle by proposing a hardware-based memory disaggregation solution that has the right amount of processing power at memory nodes. Furthermore, we take a clean-slate approach by starting from the requirements of memory disaggregation and designing a memory-disaggregation-native system. We propose a hardware-based disaggregated memory system, Clio, that virtualizes and manages disaggregated memory at the memory node. Clio includes a new hardware-based virtual memory system, a customized network system, and a framework for computation offloading. In building Clio, we not only co-design OS functionalities, hardware architecture, and the network system, but also co-design the compute node and memory node. We prototyped Clios memory node with FPGA and implemented its client-node functionalities in a user-space library. Clio achieves 100 Gbps throughput and an end-to-end latency of 2.5 us at median and 3.2 us at the 99th percentile. Clio scales much better and has orders of magnitude lower tail latency than RDMA, and it has 1.1x to 3.4x energy saving compared to CPU-based and SmartNIC-based disaggregated memory systems and is 2.7x faster than software-based SmartNIC solutions.
Personalized recommendation systems leverage deep learning models and account for the majority of data center AI cycles. Their performance is dominated by memory-bound sparse embedding operations with unique irregular memory access patterns that pose a fundamental challenge to accelerate. This paper proposes a lightweight, commodity DRAM compliant, near-memory processing solution to accelerate personalized recommendation inference. The in-depth characterization of production-grade recommendation models shows that embedding operations with high model-, operator- and data-level parallelism lead to memory bandwidth saturation, limiting recommendation inference performance. We propose RecNMP which provides a scalable solution to improve system throughput, supporting a broad range of sparse embedding models. RecNMP is specifically tailored to production environments with heavy co-location of operators on a single server. Several hardware/software co-optimization techniques such as memory-side caching, table-aware packet scheduling, and hot entry profiling are studied, resulting in up to 9.8x memory latency speedup over a highly-optimized baseline. Overall, RecNMP offers 4.2x throughput improvement and 45.8% memory energy savings.
Deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs) are used across many business-critical services at Facebook and are the single largest AI application in terms of infrastructure demand in its data-centers. In this paper we discuss the SW/HW co-designed solution for high-performance distributed training of large-scale DLRMs. We introduce a high-performance scalable software stack based on PyTorch and pair it with the new evolution of Zion platform, namely ZionEX. We demonstrate the capability to train very large DLRMs with up to 12 Trillion parameters and show that we can attain 40X speedup in terms of time to solution over previous systems. We achieve this by (i) designing the ZionEX platform with dedicated scale-out network, provisioned with high bandwidth, optimal topology and efficient transport (ii) implementing an optimized PyTorch-based training stack supporting both model and data parallelism (iii) developing sharding algorithms capable of hierarchical partitioning of the embedding tables along row, column dimensions and load balancing them across multiple workers; (iv) adding high-performance core operators while retaining flexibility to support optimizers with fully deterministic updates (v) leveraging reduced precision communications, multi-level memory hierarchy (HBM+DDR+SSD) and pipelining. Furthermore, we develop and briefly comment on distributed data ingestion and other supporting services that are required for the robust and efficient end-to-end training in production environments.
We present efficient realization of Generalized Givens Rotation (GGR) based QR factorization that achieves 3-100x better performance in terms of Gflops/watt over state-of-the-art realizations on multicore, and General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). GGR is an improvement over classical Givens Rotation (GR) operation that can annihilate multiple elements of rows and columns of an input matrix simultaneously. GGR takes 33% lesser multiplications compared to GR. For custom implementation of GGR, we identify macro operations in GGR and realize them on a Reconfigurable Data-path (RDP) tightly coupled to pipeline of a Processing Element (PE). In PE, GGR attains speed-up of 1.1x over Modified Householder Transform (MHT) presented in the literature. For parallel realization of GGR, we use REDEFINE, a scalable massively parallel Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Architecture, and show that the speed-up attained is commensurate with the hardware resources in REDEFINE. GGR also outperforms General Matrix Multiplication (gemm) by 10% in-terms of Gflops/watt which is counter-intuitive.