Kelp: QoS for Accelerated Machine Learning Systems

Development and deployment of machine learning (ML) accelerators in Warehouse Scale Computers (WSCs) demand significant capital investments and engineering efforts. However, even though heavy computation can be offloaded to the accelerators, applications often depend on the host system for various supporting tasks. As a result, contention on host resources, such as memory bandwidth, can significantly discount the performance and efficiency gains of accelerators. The impact of performance interference is further amplified in distributed learning, which has become increasingly common as model sizes continue to grow. In this work, we study the performance of four production machine learning workloads on three accelerator platforms. Our experiments show that these workloads are highly sensitive to host memory bandwidth contention, which can cause 40% average performance degradation when left unmanaged. To tackle this problem, we design and implement Kelp, a software runtime that isolates high priority accelerated ML tasks from memory resource interference. We evaluate Kelp with both production and artificial aggressor workloads, and compare its effectiveness with previously proposed solutions. Our evaluation shows that Kelp is effective in mitigating performance degradation of the accelerated tasks, and improves performance by 24% on average. Compared to previous work, Kelp reduces performance degradation of ML tasks by 7% and improves system efficiency by 17%. Our results further expose opportunities in future architecture designs.