Biblio
A secure multi-party batch matrix multiplication problem (SMBMM) is considered, where the goal is to allow a master to efficiently compute the pairwise products of two batches of massive matrices, by distributing the computation across S servers. Any X colluding servers gain no information about the input, and the master gains no additional information about the input beyond the product. A solution called Generalized Cross Subspace Alignment codes with Noise Alignment (GCSA- NA) is proposed in this work, based on cross-subspace alignment codes. The state of art solution to SMBMM is a coding scheme called polynomial sharing (PS) that was proposed by Nodehi and Maddah-Ali. GCSA-NA outperforms PS codes in several key aspects - more efficient and secure inter-server communication, lower latency, flexible inter-server network topology, efficient batch processing, and tolerance to stragglers.
We propose a serverless computing mechanism for distributed computation based on polar codes. Serverless computing is an emerging cloud based computation model that lets users run their functions on the cloud without provisioning or managing servers. Our proposed approach is a hybrid computing framework that carries out computationally expensive tasks such as linear algebraic operations involving large-scale data using serverless computing and does the rest of the processing locally. We address the limitations and reliability issues of serverless platforms such as straggling workers using coding theory, drawing ideas from recent literature on coded computation. The proposed mechanism uses polar codes to ensure straggler-resilience in a computationally effective manner. We provide extensive evidence showing polar codes outperform other coding methods. We have designed a sequential decoder specifically for polar codes in erasure channels with full-precision input and outputs. In addition, we have extended the proposed method to the matrix multiplication case where both matrices being multiplied are coded. The proposed coded computation scheme is implemented for AWS Lambda. Experiment results are presented where the performance of the proposed coded computation technique is tested in optimization via gradient descent. Finally, we introduce the idea of partial polarization which reduces the computational burden of encoding and decoding at the expense of straggler-resilience.
Tensor operations, such as matrix multiplication, are central to large-scale machine learning applications. These operations can be carried out on a distributed computing platform with a master server at the user side and multiple workers in the cloud operating in parallel. For distributed platforms, it has been recently shown that coding over the input data matrices can reduce the computational delay, yielding a tradeoff between recovery threshold and communication load. In this work, we impose an additional security constraint on the data matrices and assume that workers can collude to eavesdrop on the content of these data matrices. Specifically, we introduce a novel class of secure codes, referred to as secure generalized PolyDot codes, that generalizes previously published non-secure versions of these codes for matrix multiplication. These codes extend the state-of-the-art by allowing a flexible trade-off between recovery threshold and communication load for a fixed maximum number of colluding workers.
Tensor decompositions, which are factorizations of multi-dimensional arrays, are becoming increasingly important in large-scale data analytics. A popular tensor decomposition algorithm is Canonical Decomposition/Parallel Factorization using alternating least squares fitting (CP-ALS). Tensors that model real-world applications are often very large and sparse, driving the need for high performance implementations of decomposition algorithms, such as CP-ALS, that can take advantage of many types of compute resources. In this work we present ReFacTo, a heterogeneous distributed tensor decomposition implementation based on DeFacTo, an existing distributed memory approach to CP-ALS. DFacTo reduces the critical routine of CP-ALS to a series of sparse matrix-vector multiplications (SpMVs). ReFacTo leverages GPUs within a cluster via MPI to perform these SpMVs and uses OpenMP threads to parallelize other routines. We evaluate the performance of ReFacTo when using NVIDIA's GPU-based cuSPARSE library and compare it to an alternative implementation that uses Intel's CPU-based Math Kernel Library (MKL) for the SpMV. Furthermore, we provide a discussion of the performance challenges of heterogeneous distributed tensor decompositions based on the results we observed. We find that on up to 32 nodes, the SpMV of ReFacTo when using MKL is up to 6.8× faster than ReFacTo when using cuSPARSE.