Spread: Decentralized Model Aggregation for Scalable Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a new distributed machine learning paradigm that enables machine learning on edge devices. One unique feature of FL is that edge devices belong to individuals; and since they are not “owned” by the FL coordinator, but can be “federated” instead, there can potentially be a huge number of edge devices. In the current distributed ML architecture, the parameter server (PS) architecture, model aggregation is centralized. When facing a large number of edge devices, the centralized model aggregation becomes the bottleneck and fundamentally restricts system scalability. In this paper, we present Spread to decentralize model aggregation. Spread is a tiered architecture where nodes are organized into clusters so that model aggregation can be offloaded to certain edge devices. We design a Spread-based FL system: it employs a new algorithm for cluster construction and an adaptive algorithm that regulates, in runtime, inter-cluster model training and intra-cluster model training. We present an implementation of a functional system by extending the Federated Learning system. Our evaluation shows that Spread can resolve the bottleneck of centralized model aggregation. Spread yields an 8.05 × and a 5.58 × model training speedup as compared to existing FL systems supported by the PS and allReduce architecture.