Asynchronous Computation Model for Large-Scale Iterative Computations

Iterative algorithms are widely existed in machine learning and data mining applications. These algorithms have to be implemented in a large-scale distributed environment in order to scale to massive data sets. While synchronous iterations might result in unexpected poor performance due to some particular stragglers in a heterogeneous distributed environment, especially in a cloud environment. To bypass the synchronization barriers in iterative computations, this chapter introduces an asynchronous iteration model, delta-based accumulative iterative computation (DAIC). Different from traditional iterative computations, which iteratively update the result based on the result from the previous iteration, DAIC asynchronously updates the result by accumulating the “changes” between iterations. This chapter presents a general asynchronous computation model to describe DAIC and introduces a distributed framework for asynchronous iteration, Maiter. The experimental results show that Maiter outperforms many other state-of-the-art frameworks.