Array BP-XOR Codes for Hierarchically Distributed Matrix Multiplication

Abstract: A novel fault-tolerant computation technique based on array Belief Propagation (BP)-decodable XOR (BP-XOR) codes is proposed for distributed matrix-matrix multiplication. The proposed scheme is shown to be configurable and suited for modern hierarchical compute architectures such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) equipped with multiple nodes, whereby each has many small independent processing units with increased core-to-core communications. The proposed scheme is shown to outperform a few of the well--known earlier strategies in terms of total end-to-end execution time while in presence of slow nodes, called $stragglers$. This performance advantage is due to the careful design of array codes which distributes the encoding operation over the cluster (slave) nodes at the expense of increased master-slave communication. An interesting trade-off between end-to-end latency and total communication cost is precisely described. In addition, to be able to address an identified problem of scaling stragglers, an asymptotic version of array BP-XOR codes based on projection geometry is proposed at the expense of some computation overhead. A thorough latency analysis is conducted for all schemes to demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves order-optimal computation in both the sublinear as well as the linear regimes in the size of the computed product from an end-to-end delay perspective.