Approximate Gradient Coding for Heterogeneous Nodes

Abstract: In distributed machine learning (DML), the training data is distributed across multiple worker nodes to perform the underlying training in parallel. One major problem affecting the performance of DML algorithms is presence of stragglers. These are nodes that are terribly slow in performing their task which results in under-utilization of the training data that is stored in them. Towards this, gradient coding mitigates the impact of stragglers by adding sufficient redundancy in the data. Gradient coding and other straggler mitigation schemes assume that the straggler behavior of the worker nodes is identical. Our experiments on the Amazon AWS cluster however suggest otherwise and we see that there is a correlation in the straggler behavior across iterations. To model this, we introduce a heterogeneous straggler model where nodes are categorized into two classes, slow and active. To better utilize training data stored with slow nodes, we modify the existing gradient coding schemes with shuffling of the training data among workers. Our results (both simulation and cloud experiments) suggest remarkable improvement with shuffling over existing schemes. We perform theoretical analysis for the proposed models justifying their utility.