Task-Aware Service Placement for Distributed Learning in Wireless Edge Networks

Machine learning has been a driving force in the evolution of tremendous computing services and applications in the past decade. Traditional learning systems rely on centralized training and inference, which poses serious privacy and security concerns. To solve this problem, distributed learning over wireless edge networks (DLWENs) emerges as a trending solution and has attracted increasing research interests. In DLWENs, corresponding services need to be placed onto the edge servers to process the distributed tasks. Apparently, different placement of training services can significantly affect the performance of all distributed learning tasks. In this article, we propose TASP, a task-aware service placement scheme for distributed learning in wireless edge networks. By carefully considering the structures (directed acyclic graphs) of the distributed learning tasks, the fine-grained task requests and inter-task dependencies are incorporated into the placement strategies to realize the parallel computation of learning services. We also exploit queuing theory to characterize the dynamics caused by task uncertainties. Extensive experiments based on the Alibaba ML dataset show that, compared to the state-of-the-art schemes, the proposed work reduces the overall delay of distributed learning tasks by 38.6% on average.