cedar: Composable and Optimized Machine Learning Input Data Pipelines

The input data pipeline is an essential component of each machine learning (ML) training job. It is responsible for reading massive amounts of training data, processing batches of samples using complex transformations, and loading them onto training nodes at low latency and high throughput. Performant input data systems are becoming increasingly critical, driven by skyrocketing data volumes and training throughput demands. Unfortunately, current input data systems cannot fully leverage key performance optimizations, resulting in hugely inefficient infrastructures that require significant resources -- or worse -- underutilize expensive accelerators. To address these demands, we present cedar, a programming model and framework that allows users to easily build, optimize, and execute input data pipelines. cedar presents an easy-to-use programming interface, allowing users to define input data pipelines using composable operators that support arbitrary ML frameworks and libraries. Meanwhile, cedar transparently applies a complex and extensible set of optimization techniques (e.g., offloading, caching, prefetching, fusion, and reordering). It then orchestrates processing across a customizable set of local and distributed compute resources in order to maximize processing performance and efficiency, all without user input. On average across six diverse input data pipelines, cedar achieves a 2.49x, 1.87x, 2.18x, and 2.74x higher performance compared to tf.data, tf.data service, Ray Data, and PyTorch's DataLoader, respectively.

Efficiently Programming Large Language Models using SGLang

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for complex tasks requiring multiple chained generation calls, advanced prompting techniques, control flow, and interaction with external environments. However, efficient systems for programming and executing these applications are lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce SGLang, a Structured Generation Language for LLMs. SGLang is designed for the efficient programming of LLMs and incorporates primitives for common LLM programming patterns. We have implemented SGLang as a domain-specific language embedded in Python, and we developed an interpreter, a compiler, and a high-performance runtime for SGLang. These components work together to enable optimizations such as parallelism, batching, caching, sharing, and other compilation techniques. Additionally, we propose RadixAttention, a novel technique that maintains a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache of the Key-Value (KV) cache for all requests in a radix tree, enabling automatic KV cache reuse across multiple generation calls at runtime. SGLang simplifies the writing of LLM programs and boosts execution efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that SGLang can speed up common LLM tasks by up to 5x, while reducing code complexity and enhancing control.

FlexShard: Flexible Sharding for Industry-Scale Sequence Recommendation Models

Sequence-based deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs) are an emerging class of DLRMs showing great improvements over their prior sum-pooling based counterparts at capturing users' long term interests. These improvements come at immense system cost however, with sequence-based DLRMs requiring substantial amounts of data to be dynamically materialized and communicated by each accelerator during a single iteration. To address this rapidly growing bottleneck, we present FlexShard, a new tiered sequence embedding table sharding algorithm which operates at a per-row granularity by exploiting the insight that not every row is equal. Through precise replication of embedding rows based on their underlying probability distribution, along with the introduction of a new sharding strategy adapted to the heterogeneous, skewed performance of real-world cluster network topologies, FlexShard is able to significantly reduce communication demand while using no additional memory compared to the prior state-of-the-art. When evaluated on production-scale sequence DLRMs, FlexShard was able to reduce overall global all-to-all communication traffic by over 85%, resulting in end-to-end training communication latency improvements of almost 6x over the prior state-of-the-art approach.

RecD: Deduplication for End-to-End Deep Learning Recommendation Model Training Infrastructure

We present RecD (Recommendation Deduplication), a suite of end-to-end infrastructure optimizations across the Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM) training pipeline. RecD addresses immense storage, preprocessing, and training overheads caused by feature duplication inherent in industry-scale DLRM training datasets. Feature duplication arises because DLRM datasets are generated from interactions. While each user session can generate multiple training samples, many features' values do not change across these samples. We demonstrate how RecD exploits this property, end-to-end, across a deployed training pipeline. RecD optimizes data generation pipelines to decrease dataset storage and preprocessing resource demands and to maximize duplication within a training batch. RecD introduces a new tensor format, InverseKeyedJaggedTensors (IKJTs), to deduplicate feature values in each batch. We show how DLRM model architectures can leverage IKJTs to drastically increase training throughput. RecD improves the training and preprocessing throughput and storage efficiency by up to 2.49x, 1.79x, and 3.71x, respectively, in an industry-scale DLRM training system.

RecShard: Statistical Feature-Based Memory Optimization for Industry-Scale Neural Recommendation

We propose RecShard, a fine-grained embedding table (EMB) partitioning and placement technique for deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs). RecShard is designed based on two key observations. First, not all EMBs are equal, nor all rows within an EMB are equal in terms of access patterns. EMBs exhibit distinct memory characteristics, providing performance optimization opportunities for intelligent EMB partitioning and placement across a tiered memory hierarchy. Second, in modern DLRMs, EMBs function as hash tables. As a result, EMBs display interesting phenomena, such as the birthday paradox, leaving EMBs severely under-utilized. RecShard determines an optimal EMB sharding strategy for a set of EMBs based on training data distributions and model characteristics, along with the bandwidth characteristics of the underlying tiered memory hierarchy. In doing so, RecShard achieves over 6 times higher EMB training throughput on average for capacity constrained DLRMs. The throughput increase comes from improved EMB load balance by over 12 times and from the reduced access to the slower memory by over 87 times.

Understanding and Co-designing the Data Ingestion Pipeline for Industry-Scale RecSys Training

The data ingestion pipeline, responsible for storing and preprocessing training data, is an important component of any machine learning training job. At Facebook, we use recommendation models extensively across our services. The data ingestion requirements to train these models are substantial. In this paper, we present an extensive characterization of the data ingestion challenges for industry-scale recommendation model training. First, dataset storage requirements are massive and variable; exceeding local storage capacities. Secondly, reading and preprocessing data is computationally expensive, requiring substantially more compute, memory, and network resources than are available on trainers themselves. These demands result in drastically reduced training throughput, and thus wasted GPU resources, when current on-trainer preprocessing solutions are used. To address these challenges, we present a disaggregated data ingestion pipeline. It includes a central data warehouse built on distributed storage nodes. We introduce Data PreProcessing Service (DPP), a fully disaggregated preprocessing service that scales to hundreds of nodes, eliminating data stalls that can reduce training throughput by 56%. We implement important optimizations across storage and DPP, increasing storage and preprocessing throughput by 1.9x and 2.3x, respectively, addressing the substantial power requirements of data ingestion. We close with lessons learned and cover the important remaining challenges and opportunities surrounding data ingestion at scale.

INFaaS: Managed & Model-less Inference Serving

The number of applications relying on inference from machine learning models is already large and expected to keep growing. For instance, Facebook applications issue tens-of-trillions of inference queries per day with varying performance, accuracy, and cost constraints. Unfortunately, existing inference serving systems are neither easy to use nor cost effective. Developers must manually match the performance, accuracy, and cost constraints of their applications to a large design space that includes decisions such as selecting the right model and model optimizations, selecting the right hardware architecture, selecting the right scale-out factor, and avoiding cold-start effects. These interacting decisions are difficult to make, especially when the application load varies over time, applications evolve over time, and the available resources vary over time. We present INFaaS, an inference-as-a-service system that abstracts resource management and model selection. Users simply specify their inference task along with any performance and accuracy requirements for queries. Given the currently available resources, INFaaS automatically selects and serves inference queries using a specific model that satisfies these requirements. INFaaS autoscales resources as model load changes both within and across inference workers. It also shares workers across users and models to increase utilization. We evaluate INFaaS using 44 model architectures and their 270 model variants against serving systems rely on users for model se push model variant section and pre-load models, fix the scale policy, or use dedicated hardware resources. Our evaluation on realistic workloads shows that INFaaS achieves 2$\times$ higher throughput and violates latency SLO goals 3$\times$ less frequently, while maintaining high utilization and having overheads that are less than 12% of millisecond-scale queries.

Learning Memory Access Patterns

The explosion in workload complexity and the recent slow-down in Moore's law scaling call for new approaches towards efficient computing. Researchers are now beginning to use recent advances in machine learning in software optimizations, augmenting or replacing traditional heuristics and data structures. However, the space of machine learning for computer hardware architecture is only lightly explored. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of deep learning to address the von Neumann bottleneck of memory performance. We focus on the critical problem of learning memory access patterns, with the goal of constructing accurate and efficient memory prefetchers. We relate contemporary prefetching strategies to n-gram models in natural language processing, and show how recurrent neural networks can serve as a drop-in replacement. On a suite of challenging benchmark datasets, we find that neural networks consistently demonstrate superior performance in terms of precision and recall. This work represents the first step towards practical neural-network based prefetching, and opens a wide range of exciting directions for machine learning in computer architecture research.