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Marcel Wagenländer

Publications and source records attributed to Marcel Wagenländer.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Scepsy: Serving Agentic Workflows Using Aggregate LLM Pipelines

Agentic workflows carry out complex tasks by orchestrating multiple large language models (LLMs) and tools. Serving them at a target throughput with low latency is hard because they are written in arbitrary agentic frameworks and their execution times are unpredictable: execution branches, fans out, or recurs in data-dependent ways. Since their LLMs often outnumber the available GPUs, they also oversubscribe GPUs. We describe Scepsy, a serving system that schedules arbitrary multi-LLM agentic workflows onto a GPU cluster. Scepsy exploits the insight that, while the end-to-end latency of an agentic workflow is unpredictable, each LLM's fraction of execution time is comparatively stable across requests. Scepsy profiles each LLM under different parallelism degrees and combines the profiles with these fractions into an Aggregate LLM Pipeline, a lightweight throughput and latency predictor for allocations. To minimize latency at a target throughput, Scepsy uses the Aggregate LLM Pipeline to search over fractional GPU shares, tensor parallelism degrees, and replica counts. A hierarchical heuristic then places the chosen allocation onto the cluster, minimizing fragmentation and respecting network topology. On realistic agentic workflows, Scepsy achieves up to 2.5x higher throughput before saturation and 1.0-3.3x lower latency than systems that optimize LLMs independently or rely on user-specified allocations.

cs.DC↗

Tangram: Hiding GPU Heterogeneity for Efficient LLM Parallelization

The scale of LLM training jobs requires parallelization planning over large GPU clusters. Due to different GPU types and interconnects added over time, these GPU clusters are increasingly heterogeneous. Automatic LLM parallelizers can search for parallelization plans but face an exploding search space with heterogeneous GPUs. To make search tractable in heterogeneous GPU clusters, parallelizers often omit types of parallelism (e.g., expert parallelism) or memory-saving techniques (e.g., ZeRO), which results in worse plans. We describe Tangram, a system that enables the use of existing heterogeneity-unaware LLM parallelizers in heterogeneous GPU clusters by decoupling parallelization planning from GPU heterogeneity. For this, Tangram exploits two insights: (1) since bulk purchases result in sets of GPUs with similar compute, memory, and connectivity, Tangram can expose such homogeneous GPU islands to existing parallelizers; and (2) parallelizers commonly first partition models and then parallelize partitions. Tangram can compose such model slices, assigned to GPU islands, into work-balanced pipelines for high throughput. Tangram integrates with existing parallelizers through a narrow API, which relies on the enumeration of model-slice/island pairs. Tangram achieves up to 2.3x higher training throughput than current heterogeneous parallelizers (Metis and Sailor) and scales to large GPU clusters by pruning enumerated plans.

cs.DC↗

Tenplex: Dynamic Parallelism for Deep Learning using Parallelizable Tensor Collections

Deep learning (DL) jobs use multi-dimensional parallelism, i.e. combining data, model, and pipeline parallelism, to use large GPU clusters efficiently. Long-running jobs may experience changes to their GPU allocation: (i) resource elasticity during training adds or removes GPUs; (ii) hardware maintenance may require redeployment on different GPUs; and (iii) GPU failures force jobs to run with fewer devices. Current DL frameworks tie jobs to a set of GPUs and thus lack support for these scenarios. In particular, they cannot change the multi-dimensional parallelism of an already-running job in an efficient and model-independent way. We describe Scalai, a state management library for DL systems that enables jobs to change their parallelism dynamically after the GPU allocation is updated at runtime. Scalai achieves this through a new abstraction, a parallelizable tensor collection (PTC), that externalizes the job state during training. After a GPU change, Scalai uses the PTC to transform the job state: the PTC repartitions the dataset state under data parallelism and exposes it to DL workers through a virtual file system; and the PTC obtains the model state as partitioned checkpoints and transforms them to reflect the new parallelization configuration. For efficiency, Scalai executes PTC transformations in parallel with minimum data movement between workers. Our experiments show that Scalai enables DL jobs to support dynamic parallelization with low overhead.

cs.DC↗

Recommendations for Baselines and Benchmarking Approximate Gaussian Processes

Gaussian processes (GPs) are a mature and widely-used component of the ML toolbox. One of their desirable qualities is automatic hyperparameter selection, which allows for training without user intervention. However, in many realistic settings, approximations are typically needed, which typically do require tuning. We argue that this requirement for tuning complicates evaluation, which has led to a lack of a clear recommendations on which method should be used in which situation. To address this, we make recommendations for comparing GP approximations based on a specification of what a user should expect from a method. In addition, we develop a training procedure for the variational method of Titsias [2009] that leaves no choices to the user, and show that this is a strong baseline that meets our specification. We conclude that benchmarking according to our suggestions gives a clearer view of the current state of the field, and uncovers problems that are still open that future papers should address.

cs.LG↗