Clairvoyant Prefetching for Distributed Machine Learning I/O

I/O is emerging as a major bottleneck for machine learning training, especially in distributed environments such as clouds and supercomputers. Optimal data ingestion pipelines differ between systems, and increasing efficiency requires a delicate balance between access to local storage, external filesystems, and remote workers; yet existing frameworks fail to efficiently utilize such resources. We observe that, given the seed generating the random access pattern for training with SGD, we have clairvoyance and can exactly predict when a given sample will be accessed. We combine this with a theoretical analysis of access patterns in training and performance modeling to produce a novel machine learning I/O middleware, HDMLP, to tackle the I/O bottleneck. HDMLP provides an easy-to-use, flexible, and scalable solution that delivers better performance than state-of-the-art approaches while requiring very few changes to existing codebases and supporting a broad range of environments.