GiPH: Generalizable Placement Learning for Adaptive Heterogeneous Computing

TL;DR

GiPH introduces a novel graph neural network approach that learns to efficiently place applications in dynamic, heterogeneous device clusters, significantly reducing completion times and adapting to changing environments.

Contribution

The paper presents GiPH, a new learning-based placement method that generalizes to dynamic device clusters using a graph representation and scalable GNN, addressing limitations of fixed-cluster assumptions.

Findings

GiPH achieves up to 30.5% lower completion times.

GiPH searches up to 3X faster than existing policies.

The approach generalizes well to various task graphs and device configurations.

Abstract

Careful placement of a computational application within a target device cluster is critical for achieving low application completion time. The problem is challenging due to its NP-hardness and combinatorial nature. In recent years, learning-based approaches have been proposed to learn a placement policy that can be applied to unseen applications, motivated by the problem of placing a neural network across cloud servers. These approaches, however, generally assume the device cluster is fixed, which is not the case in mobile or edge computing settings, where heterogeneous devices move in and out of range for a particular application. We propose a new learning approach called GiPH, which learns policies that generalize to dynamic device clusters via 1) a novel graph representation gpNet that efficiently encodes the information needed for choosing a good placement, and 2) a scalable graph neural network (GNN) that learns a summary of the gpNet information. GiPH turns the placement problem into that of finding a sequence of placement improvements, learning a policy for selecting this sequence that scales to problems of arbitrary size. We evaluate GiPH with a wide range of task graphs and device clusters and show that our learned policy rapidly find good placements for new problem instances. GiPH finds placements with up to 30.5% lower completion times, searching up to 3X faster than other search-based placement policies.