HEALS: A Parallel eALS Recommendation System on CPU/GPU Heterogeneous Platforms

Alternating Least Square (ALS) is a classic algorithm to solve matrix factorization widely used in recommendation systems. Existing efforts focus on parallelizing ALS on multi-/many-core platforms to handle large datasets. Recently, an optimized ALS variant called eALS was proposed, and it yields significantly lower time complexity and higher recommending accuracy than ALS. However, it is challenging to parallelize eALS on modern parallel architectures (e.g., CPUs and GPUs) because: 1) eALS’ data dependence prevents it from fine-grained parallel execution, thus eALS cannot fully utilize GPU's massive parallelism, 2) the sparsity of input data causes poor data locality and unbalanced workload, and 3) its large memory usage cannot fit into GPU's limited on-device memory, particularly for real-world large datasets. This paper proposes an efficient CPU/GPU heterogeneous rec-ommendation system based on fast eALS for the first time (called HEALS) that consists of a set of system optimizations. HEALS employs newly designed architecture-adaptive data formats to achieve load balance and good data locality on CPU and GPU. HEALS also presents a CPU/GPU collaboration model that can explore both task parallelism and data parallelism. HEALS also optimizes this collaboration model with data communication overlapping and dynamic workload partition between CPU and GPU. Moreover, HEALS is further enhanced by various parallel techniques (e.g., loop unrolling, vectorization, and GPU parallel reduction). Evaluation results show that HEALS outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines in both performance and recom-mendation quality. Particularly, HEALS achieves up to 5.75 x better performance than a state-of-the-art ALS GPU library. This work also demonstrates the possibility of conducting fast recommendations on large datasets with constrained (or relaxed) hardware resources, e.g, a single CPU/GPU node.