Runtime Data Layout Scheduling for Machine Learning Dataset

Machine Learning (ML) approaches are widely-used classification/regression methods for data mining applications. However, the time-consuming training process greatly limits the efficiency of ML approaches. We use the example of SVM (traditional ML algorithm) and DNN (state-of-the-art ML algorithm) to illustrate the idea in this paper. For SVM, a major performance bottleneck of current tools is that they use a unified data storage format because the data formats can have a significant influence on the complexity of storage and computation, memory bandwidth, and the efficiency of parallel processing. To address the problem above, we study the factors influencing the algorithm's performance and conduct auto-tuning to speed up SVM training. DNN training is even slower than SVM. For example, using a 8-core CPUs to train AlexNet model by CIFAR-10 dataset costs 8.2 hours. CIFAR-10 is only 170 MB, which is not efficient for distributed processing. Moreover, due to the algorithm limitation, only a small batch of data can be processed at each iteration. We focus on finding the right algorithmic parameters and using auto-tuning techniques to make the algorithm run faster. For SVM training, our implementation achieves 1.7-16.3x speedup (6.8x on average) against the non-adaptive case (using the worst data format) for various datasets. For DNN training on CIFAR-10 dataset, we reduce the time from 8.2 hours to only roughly 1 minute. We use the benchmark of dollars per speedup to help the users to select the right deep learning hardware.