Popularity Prediction for Social Media over Arbitrary Time Horizons
Daniel Haimovich, Dima Karamshuk, Thomas Leeper, Evgeniy Riabenko, Milan Vojnovic
International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)
Personalized recommendation systems leverage deep learning models and account for the majority of data center AI cycles. Their performance is dominated by memory-bound sparse embedding operations with unique irregular memory access patterns that pose a fundamental challenge to accelerate. This paper proposes a lightweight, commodity DRAM compliant, near-memory processing solution to accelerate personalized recommendation inference. The in-depth characterization of production-grade recommendation models shows that embedding operations with high model-, operator- and data-level parallelism lead to memory bandwidth saturation, limiting recommendation inference performance. We propose RecNMP which provides a scalable solution to improve system throughput, supporting a broad range of sparse embedding models. RecNMP is specifically tailored to production environments with heavy co-location of operators on a single server. Several hardware/software co-optimization techniques such as memory-side caching, table-aware packet scheduling, and hot entry profiling are studied, providing up to 9.8× memory latency speedup over a highly optimized baseline. Overall, RecNMP offers 4.2× throughput improvement and 45.8% memory energy savings.
Daniel Haimovich, Dima Karamshuk, Thomas Leeper, Evgeniy Riabenko, Milan Vojnovic
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