Experience Paper: Towards enhancing cost efficiency in serverless machine learning training
Proceedings of the 22nd International Middleware Conference, 2021
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Abstract
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) has raised a growing interest in how to "tame" serverless to enable domain-specific use cases such as data-intensive applications and machine learning (ML), to name a few. Recently, several systems have been implemented for training ML models. Certainly, these research articles are significant steps in the correct direction. However, they do not completely answer the nagging question of when serverless ML training can be more cost-effective compared to traditional "serverful" computing. To help in this task, we propose MLLess, a FaaS-based ML training prototype built atop IBM Cloud Functions. To boost cost-efficiency, MLLess implements two key optimizations: a significance filter and a scale-in auto-tuner, and leverages them to specialize model training to the FaaS model. Our results certify that MLLess can be 15X faster than serverful ML systems at a lower cost for ML models (such as sparse logistic regression and matrix factorization) that exhibit fast convergence.
Cite this paper
@inproceedings{sanchez2021mlless,
title = {Experience Paper: Towards enhancing cost efficiency in serverless machine learning training},
author = {S{\'a}nchez-Artigas, Marc and Gimeno Sarroca, Pablo},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd International Middleware Conference},
address = {Qu{\'e}bec City, Canada},
pages = {210--222},
publisher = {ACM},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.1145/3464298.3494884}
}
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. The PDF is the author's version of the work, posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 22nd International Middleware Conference, https://doi.org/10.1145/3464298.3494884.