Fast and Scalable Distributed Tensor Decompositions

Abstract

Tensor decomposition is a prominent technique for analyzing multi-attribute data and is being increasingly used for data analysis in different application areas. Tensor decomposition methods are computationally intense and often involve irregular memory accesses over large-scale sparse data. Hence it becomes critical to optimize the execution of such data intensive computations and associated data movement to reduce the eventual time-to-solution in data analysis applications. With the prevalence of using advanced high-performance computing (HPC) systems for data analysis applications, it is becoming increasingly important to provide fast and scalable implementation of tensor decompositions and execute them efficiently on modern and advanced HPC systems. In this paper, we present distributed tensor decomposition methods that achieve faster, memory-efficient, and communication-reduced execution on HPC systems. We demonstrate that our techniques reduce the overall communication and execution time of tensor decomposition methods when they are used for analyzing datasets of varied size from real application. We illustrate our results on HPE Superdome Flex server, a high-end modular system offering large-scale in-memory computing, and on a distributed cluster of Intel Xeon multi-core nodes.