FedSLO: Towards SLO Guarantee for Federated Computing

Federated computing, including federated learning and federated analytics, needs to meet certain task Service Level Objective (SLO) in terms of various performance metrics, e.g., mean task response time and task tail latency. The lack of control and access to client activities requires a carefully crafted client selection process for each round of task processing to meet a designated task SLO. To achieve this, one must be able to predict task performance metrics for a given client selection per round of task execution. In this paper, we develop, FedSLO, a general framework that allows task performance in terms of a wide range of performance metrics of practical interest to be predicted for synchronous federated computing systems, in line with the Google federated learning system architecture. Specifically, with each task performance metric expressed as a cost function of the task response time, a relationship between the task performance measure - the mean cost and task/subtask response time distributions is established, allowing for unified task performance prediction algorithms to be developed. Practical issues concerning the computational complexity, measurement cost and implementation of FedSLO are also addressed. Finally, we propose preliminary ideas on how to apply FedSLO to the client selection process to enable task SLO guarantee.