Avoiding communication in primal and dual block coordinate descent methods

TL;DR

This paper introduces communication-avoiding primal and dual block coordinate descent methods that significantly reduce synchronization frequency in distributed optimization, maintaining convergence while achieving notable speedups.

Contribution

It adapts communication-avoiding techniques from Krylov methods to primal and dual block coordinate descent, enabling fewer communications without sacrificing convergence.

Findings

Reduced synchronization by a factor of s

Achieved up to 6.1x speedup on supercomputers

Maintained convergence rates despite fewer communications

Abstract

Primal and dual block coordinate descent methods are iterative methods for solving regularized and unregularized optimization problems. Distributed-memory parallel implementations of these methods have become popular in analyzing large machine learning datasets. However, existing implementations communicate at every iteration which, on modern data center and supercomputing architectures, often dominates the cost of floating-point computation. Recent results on communication-avoiding Krylov subspace methods suggest that large speedups are possible by re-organizing iterative algorithms to avoid communication. We show how applying similar algorithmic transformations can lead to primal and dual block coordinate descent methods that only communicate every $s$ iterations--where $s$ is a tuning parameter--instead of every iteration for the \textit{regularized least-squares problem}. We show that the communication-avoiding variants reduce the number of synchronizations by a factor of $s$ on distributed-memory parallel machines without altering the convergence rate and attains strong scaling speedups of up to $6.1\times$ on a Cray XC30 supercomputer.