Title: Ease.ml: Towards Multi-tenant Resource Sharing for Machine Learning Workloads,
Abstract: We present ease.ml, a declarative machine learning service platform we built
to support more than ten research groups outside the computer science
departments at ETH Zurich for their machine learning needs. With ease.ml, a
user defines the high-level schema of a machine learning application and
submits the task via a Web interface. The system automatically deals with the
rest, such as model selection and data movement. In this paper, we describe the
ease.ml architecture and focus on a novel technical problem introduced by
ease.ml regarding resource allocation. We ask, as a "service provider" that
manages a shared cluster of machines among all our users running machine
learning workloads, what is the resource allocation strategy that maximizes the
global satisfaction of all our users?
Resource allocation is a critical yet subtle issue in this multi-tenant
scenario, as we have to balance between efficiency and fairness. We first
formalize the problem that we call multi-tenant model selection, aiming for
minimizing the total regret of all users running automatic model selection
tasks. We then develop a novel algorithm that combines multi-armed bandits with
Bayesian optimization and prove a regret bound under the multi-tenant setting.
Finally, we report our evaluation of ease.ml on synthetic data and on one
service we are providing to our users, namely, image classification with deep
neural networks. Our experimental evaluation results show that our proposed
solution can be up to 9.8x faster in achieving the same global quality for all
users as the two popular heuristics used by our users before ease.ml.