Persia: Scaling DL Based Recommenders Up To 100 Trillion Parameters


Mar 15, 12:00 PM PDT
  • Virtual SF Big Analytics
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This event is hosted by SF Big Analytics Group. https://www.meetup.com/SF-Big-Analytics

Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth of the model scale in recommendation/Ads/search—from Google’s 2016 model with 1 billion parameters to the latest Facebook’s model with 12 trillion parameters. Significant quality boost has come with each jump of the model capacity, which makes people believe the era of 100 trillion parameters is around the corner. To prepare the exponential growth of the model size, an efficient distributed training system is in urgent need. However, the training of such huge models is challenging even within industrial scale data centers.

In this talk, I will introduce Persia -- an open training system developed by my team -- to resolve this challenge by careful co-design of both the optimization algorithm and the distributed system architecture. Persia admits nearly linear speedup properties while scaling the number of workers and the model size. Beside the capability of training 100 trillion parameters, it also shows a clear advantage in efficiency over other open sourced engines.

Ji Liu

Dr. Ji Liu received his Ph.D in computer science and his bachelor degree in automation from University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Science and Technology of China, respectively. After graduation, he joined the University of Rochester as an assistant professor, conducting research in machine learning, optimization, and reinforcement learning. The developed asynchronous and decentralized algorithms were widely used in industry, such as IBM, Microsoft, etc. He left academia and joined Tencent in 2017, exploring AI’s boundary. The developing AI agent Tstarbot was considered to be a milestone for mastering the most challenging RTS game -- Starcraft II. His second stop in industry is Kwai - the second largest short video company in China. He founded and led multiple international teams with different functionalities: platform team, product team, and research team. His team Contributed to 15+% annual revenue growth in Ads. He published 100+ papers in top-tier CS conferences and journals, and received multiple best paper awards (e.g., SIGKDD 2010 and UAI 2015 Facebook best paper). He was an awardee of MIT TR 35 under 35 in China and IBM faculty award in 2017. He was nominated to be one of China top 5 AI innovators under 35 in 2018.
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