Evan, Joseph Thank you for valuable suggestions. It would be great to improve TreeAggregate (if possible).
Making less updates would certainly make sense, though that will mean using batch gradient such as LBFGS. It seems as today it is the only viable option in Spark. I will also take a look into how to zip the data sent as update. Do you know any options except going from double to single precision (or less) ? Best regards, Alexander From: Evan Sparks [mailto:evan.spa...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, October 17, 2015 2:24 PM To: Joseph Bradley Cc: Ulanov, Alexander; dev@spark.apache.org Subject: Re: Gradient Descent with large model size Yes, remember that your bandwidth is the maximum number of bytes per second that can be shipped to the driver. So if you've got 5 blocks that size, then it looks like you're basically saturating the network. Aggregation trees help for many partitions/nodes and butterfly mixing can help use all of the network resources. I have seen implementations of butterfly mixing in spark but don't know if we've got one in mainline. Zhao and Canny's work [1] details this approach in the context of model fitting. At any rate, for this type of ANN work with huge models in *any* distributed setting, you're going to need to get faster networking (most production deployments I know of either have 10 gigabit Ethernet or 40 gigabit infiniband links), or figure out a way to decrease frequency or density of updates. Both would be even better. [1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/papers/13/butterflymixing.pdf On Oct 17, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Joseph Bradley <jos...@databricks.com<mailto:jos...@databricks.com>> wrote: The decrease in running time from N=6 to N=7 makes some sense to me; that should be when tree aggregation kicks in. I'd call it an improvement to run in the same ~13sec increasing from N=6 to N=9. "Does this mean that for 5 nodes with treeaggreate of depth 1 it will take 5*3.1~15.5 seconds?" --> I would guess so since all of that will be aggregated on the driver, but I don't know enough about Spark's shuffling/networking to say for sure. Others may be able to help more. Your numbers do make me wonder if we should examine the structure of the tree aggregation more carefully and see if we can improve it. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-11168 Joseph On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Ulanov, Alexander <alexander.ula...@hpe.com<mailto:alexander.ula...@hpe.com>> wrote: Hi Joseph, There seems to be no improvement if I run it with more partitions or bigger depth: N = 6 Avg time: 13.491579108666668 N = 7 Avg time: 8.929480508 N = 8 Avg time: 14.507123471999998 N= 9 Avg time: 13.854871645333333 Depth = 3 N=2 Avg time: 8.853895346333333 N=5 Avg time: 15.991574924666667 I also measured the bandwidth of my network with iperf. It shows 247Mbit/s. So the transfer of 12M array of double message should take 64 * 12M/247M~3.1s. Does this mean that for 5 nodes with treeaggreate of depth 1 it will take 5*3.1~15.5 seconds? Best regards, Alexander From: Joseph Bradley [mailto:jos...@databricks.com<mailto:jos...@databricks.com>] Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 11:35 PM To: Ulanov, Alexander Cc: dev@spark.apache.org<mailto:dev@spark.apache.org> Subject: Re: Gradient Descent with large model size For those numbers of partitions, I don't think you'll actually use tree aggregation. The number of partitions needs to be over a certain threshold (>= 7) before treeAggregate really operates on a tree structure: https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/9808052b5adfed7dafd6c1b3971b998e45b2799a/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/rdd/RDD.scala#L1100 Do you see a slower increase in running time with more partitions? For 5 partitions, do you find things improve if you tell treeAggregate to use depth > 2? Joseph On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Ulanov, Alexander <alexander.ula...@hpe.com<mailto:alexander.ula...@hpe.com>> wrote: Dear Spark developers, I have noticed that Gradient Descent is Spark MLlib takes long time if the model is large. It is implemented with TreeAggregate. I’ve extracted the code from GradientDescent.scala to perform the benchmark. It allocates the Array of a given size and the aggregates it: val dataSize = 12000000 val n = 5 val maxIterations = 3 val rdd = sc.parallelize(0 until n, n).cache() rdd.count() var avgTime = 0.0 for (i <- 1 to maxIterations) { val start = System.nanoTime() val result = rdd.treeAggregate((new Array[Double](dataSize), 0.0, 0L))( seqOp = (c, v) => { // c: (grad, loss, count) val l = 0.0 (c._1, c._2 + l, c._3 + 1) }, combOp = (c1, c2) => { // c: (grad, loss, count) (c1._1, c1._2 + c2._2, c1._3 + c2._3) }) avgTime += (System.nanoTime() - start) / 1e9 assert(result._1.length == dataSize) } println("Avg time: " + avgTime / maxIterations) If I run on my cluster of 1 master and 5 workers, I get the following results (given the array size = 12M): n = 1: Avg time: 4.555709667333333 n = 2 Avg time: 7.059724584666667 n = 3 Avg time: 9.937117377666667 n = 4 Avg time: 12.687526233 n = 5 Avg time: 12.939526129666667 Could you explain why the time becomes so big? The data transfer of 12M array of double should take ~ 1 second in 1Gbit network. There might be other overheads, however not that big as I observe. Best regards, Alexander
