Dan Hurt
I am a recovering physicist that joined Google in 2015 to work on integrating large scale accelerator (GPU & TPU) systems within data centers. After that I joined the Google Brain team as a TPM with a focus on making researchers and engineers more effective.
Research Areas
Authored Publications
Sort By
Pathways: Asynchronous Distributed Dataflow for ML
Aakanksha Chowdhery
Ruoming Pang
Sudip Roy
Brennan Saeta
Parker Edward Schuh
Ryan Sepassi
MLSys 2022 (2022) (to appear)
Preview abstract
We present the design of a new large scale orchestration layer for accelerators. Our system, Pathways, is explicitly designed to enable exploration of new systems and ML research ideas, while retaining state of the art performance for current models. Pathways uses a sharded dataflow graph of asynchronous operators that consume and produce futures, and efficiently gang-schedules heterogeneous parallel computations on thousands of accelerators while coordinating data transfers over their dedicated interconnects. Pathways makes use of a novel asynchronous distributed dataflow design that lets the control plane execute in parallel despite dependencies in the data plane. This design, with careful engineering, allows Pathways to adopt a single-controller model that makes it easier to express complex new parallelism patterns. We demonstrate that Pathways can achieve performance parity (~100% accelerator utilization) with state-of-the-art systems when running SPMD computations over 2048 TPUs, while also delivering throughput comparable to the SPMD case for Transformer models that are pipelined across 16 stages, or sharded across two islands of accelerators connected over a data center network.
View details
