Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1612.08608

ASAP: Asynchronous Approximate Data-Parallel Computation

Asim Kadav·Erik Kruus
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Emerging workloads, such as graph processing and machine learning are approximate because of the scale of data involved and the stochastic nature of the underlying algorithms. These algorithms are often distributed over multiple machines using bulk-synchronous processing (BSP) or other synchronous processing paradigms such as map-reduce. However, data parallel processing primitives such as repeated barrier and reduce operations introduce high synchronization overheads. Hence, many existing data-processing platforms use asynchrony and staleness to improve data-parallel job performance. Often, these systems simply change the synchronous communication to asynchronous between the worker nodes in the cluster. This improves the throughput of data processing but results in poor accuracy of the final output since different workers may progress at different speeds and process inconsistent intermediate outputs. In this paper, we present ASAP, a model that provides asynchronous and approximate processing semantics for data-parallel computation. ASAP provides fine-grained worker synchronization using NOTIFY-ACK semantics that allows independent workers to run asynchronously. ASAP also provides stochastic reduce that provides approximate but guaranteed convergence to the same result as an aggregated all-reduce. In our results, we show that ASAP can reduce synchronization costs and provides 2-10X speedups in convergence and up to 10X savings in network costs for distributed machine learning applications and provides strong convergence guarantees.

Explore related subjects

cs.DCcs.LG

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Asim Kadav, Erik Kruus. 2016-12-27. ASAP: Asynchronous Approximate Data-Parallel Computation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.08608

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Fast and Robust Information Spreading in the Noisy PULL Model

Efficient information spreading in stochastic multi agent systems is a core challenge when communication is noisy, bandwidth limited, and agents lack global coordination. Yet biological systems, including ant colonies and fish schools, routinely overcome these constraints. A small number of informed individuals can reliably guide large, uncoordinated populations using minimal, noisy signals. Motivated by these observations, we study how reliable information dissemination can be achieved in such bio inspired settings. A population of $n$ agents, each with a binary preference, includes a designated subset of source agents, and the goal is to converge to the majority preference among the sources. In the noisy $\mathcal{PULL}(h)$ model, each agent observes noisy messages from $h$ randomly sampled peers in every round. Prior work shows that convergence requires $Ω(n/h)$ rounds even under favorable conditions. We ask how far we can push simplicity, with no synchronization at the start time and minimal message size, without compromising convergence speed. We present a quasi self-stabilizing protocol using only 2-bit messages that converges from arbitrary initial states despite severe noise and initial asynchrony. It achieves optimal convergence time $O((n/h)\log n)$ with high probability, and in particular $O(\log n)$ time in the snapshot regime $h=Θ(n)$. A key subroutine is an even simpler 1-bit protocol assuming simultaneous start, based on a natural two phase listen then amplify mechanism. Together, our results show that simple, biologically inspired protocols can achieve optimal and robust information dissemination even in highly unreliable and uncoordinated systems.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

LOIP:Collaborative Lossless LLM Inference Serving with Offloading-based Pipeline Parallelism on Edge Devices

Providing lossless inference services of LLMs on edge devices remains challenging, especially given the extremely tight memory budgets. The existing offloading techniques inevitably introduce numerous loading bubbles, which further inflate the end-to-end latency of the entire inference pipeline. Meanwhile, dynamically fluctuating network bandwidth and diverse user request patterns pose additional obstacles to efficient lossless inference on edge devices. To address this, we propose LOIP, a collaborative lossless LLM inference system that employs an offloading-based interleaved pipeline parallelism to better overlap model offloading with computing and communicating. Specifically, LOIP first constructs an offloading-aware cost model to characterize inference latency and memory overhead under heterogeneous device capabilities and limited bandwidth. Based on this cost model, LOIP develops a fine-grained allocation scheduler that determines latency-efficient layer partitions across devices while explicitly accounting for offloading overhead, along with a unified memory architecture (UMA)-aware loading optimization using customized CUDA operators to reduce runtime loading overhead. LOIP further designs an online memory adaptation strategy to handle the increasing KV cache pressure and dynamic bandwidth fluctuations during inference. We implement LOIP with 2500+ lines of Python and 500+ lines of C++/CUDA code, and deploy it on five heterogeneous NVIDIA Jetson edge devices for lossless collaborative inference of LLaMA3.3-70B-Instruct. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LOIP achieves 8.8$\times$$\sim$20.3$\times$ speedups over the SOTA baselines under different bandwidth conditions and request patterns without compromising model accuracy.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Fluid Notarization: Verifiable Evolution of Concurrently Edited Structured Documents

Traditional blockchain-based document notarization follows a snapshot-oriented model in which each document revision is represented as an independent state anchored on-chain through a cryptographic reference. While effective for immutable artifacts, this approach becomes inadequate when documents evolve through collaborative editing. Concurrent modifications create divergent document versions that must be reconciled outside the notarization layer, while even minor changes require generating and distributing new document snapshots. Conversely, collaborative replication frameworks such as CRDTs provide deterministic reconciliation of concurrent updates, but do not inherently provide independently verifiable evidence of when contributions were published. This paper introduces Fluid Notarization, a notarization paradigm in which document evolution itself becomes the object of notarization. Rather than certifying isolated states, Fluid Notarization certifies a graph of causally related evolution artifacts generated by a JSON-native delta-CRDT. The proposed model builds upon Melda, which represents document changes as compact, content-addressed deltas linked through causal dependencies. Blockchain notarization is reduced to recording identifiers of these evolution artifacts, while synchronization, reconstruction, and conflict resolution remain entirely off-chain. The resulting architecture combines two complementary guarantees: deterministic convergence provided by the CRDT and independently auditable proof-of-existence, provenance, and publication evidence provided by the blockchain. A prototype implementation and validation scenario based on collaboratively edited electronic health records demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and highlight the advantages of notarizing document evolution rather than successive document snapshots.

cs.DC↗