acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Compressing Matrices for Large-Scale Machine Learning


Demand for more powerful big data analytics solutions has spurred the development of novel programming models, abstractions, and platforms for next-generation systems. For these problems, a complete solution would address data wrangling and processing, and it would support analytics over data of any modality or scale. It would support a wide array of machine learning algorithms, but also provide primitives for building new ones. It would be customizable, scale to vast volumes of data, and map to modern multicore, GPU, coprocessor, and compute cluster hardware. In pursuit of these goals, novel techniques and solutions are being developed by machine learning researchers,4,6,7 in the database and distributed systems research communities,2,5,8 and by major players in industry.1,3 These platforms provide higher-level abstractions for machine learning over data, and they perform optimizations for modern hardware.

Elgohary et al.'s work on "Scaling Machine Learning via Compressed Linear Algebra," which first appeared in the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment,2 seeks to address many of these challenges by applying database ideas (cost estimation, query optimization, cost-based data placement and layout). It was conducted within IBM and Apache's SystemML declarative machine learning project. The paper shows just how effective such database techniques can be in a machine learning setting. The authors observe that the core data objects in machine learning (feature matrices, weight vectors) tend to have regular structure and repeated values. Machine learning tasks over such data are composed from lower-level linear algebra operations. Such operations generally involve repeated floating-point computations, which are bandwidth-limited as the CPU traverses large matrices in RAM.


 

No entries found

Log in to Read the Full Article

Sign In

Sign in using your ACM Web Account username and password to access premium content if you are an ACM member, Communications subscriber or Digital Library subscriber.

Need Access?

Please select one of the options below for access to premium content and features.

Create a Web Account

If you are already an ACM member, Communications subscriber, or Digital Library subscriber, please set up a web account to access premium content on this site.

Join the ACM

Become a member to take full advantage of ACM's outstanding computing information resources, networking opportunities, and other benefits.
  

Subscribe to Communications of the ACM Magazine

Get full access to 50+ years of CACM content and receive the print version of the magazine monthly.

Purchase the Article

Non-members can purchase this article or a copy of the magazine in which it appears.
Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account