Designing and implementing efficient, provably correct parallel machine
learning (ML) algorithms is challenging. Existing high-level parallel
abstractions like MapReduce are insufficiently expressive while low-level tools
like MPI and Pthreads leave ML experts repeatedly solving the same design
challenges. By targeting common patterns in ML, we developed GraphLab, which
improves upon abstractions like MapReduce by compactly expressing asynchronous
iterative algorithms with sparse computational dependencies while ensuring data
consistency and achieving a high degree of parallel performance. We demonstrate
the expressiveness of the GraphLab framework by designing and implementing
parallel versions of belief propagation, Gibbs sampling, Co-EM, Lasso and
Compressed Sensing. We show that using GraphLab we can achieve excellent
parallel performance on large scale real-world problems.

通过针对机器学习中常见程序设计模式进行设计，使用 GraphLab 可以实现异步迭代算法的紧凑表达，同时保证数据一致性和高并行性能，将并行性能优化的提升应用于大规模实际问题中，并取得了很好的表现。

GraphLab: 并行机器学习的新框架

GraphLab: A New Framework For Parallel Machine Learning

While high-level data parallel frameworks, like MapReduce, simplify the
design and implementation of large-scale data processing systems, they do not
naturally or efficiently support many important data mining and machine
learning algorithms and can lead to inefficient learning systems. To help fill
this critical void, we introduced the GraphLab abstraction which naturally
expresses asynchronous, dynamic, graph-parallel computation while ensuring data
consistency and achieving a high degree of parallel performance in the
shared-memory setting. In this paper, we extend the GraphLab framework to the
substantially more challenging distributed setting while preserving strong data
consistency guarantees. We develop graph based extensions to pipelined locking
and data versioning to reduce network congestion and mitigate the effect of
network latency. We also introduce fault tolerance to the GraphLab abstraction
using the classic Chandy-Lamport snapshot algorithm and demonstrate how it can
be easily implemented by exploiting the GraphLab abstraction itself. Finally,
we evaluate our distributed implementation of the GraphLab abstraction on a
large Amazon EC2 deployment and show 1-2 orders of magnitude performance gains
over Hadoop-based implementations.

本文介绍了 GraphLab 抽象并将其扩展到更具挑战性的分布式环境中，在保证数据一致性的同时，采取图形扩展 pipelined locking 和数据版本控制，以减少网络拥塞和缓解网络延迟的影响，通过 Chandy-Lamport 快照算法实现 GraphLab 抽象的容错，并在 Amazon EC2 系统上进行了分布式的 GraphLab 抽象实现，展示了与基于 Hadoop 实现相比 1-2 个数量级的性能提升。