PreVision: An Out-of-Core Matrix Computation System with Optimal Buffer Replacement

Abstract

Large-scale matrix computations have become indispensable in artificial intelligence and scientific applications. It is of paramount importance to efficiently perform out-of-core computations that often entail an excessive amount of disk I/O. Unfortunately, however, most existing systems do not focus on disk I/O aspects and are vulnerable to performance degradation when the scale of input matrices and intermediate data grows large. To address this problem, we present a new out-of-core matrix computation system called PreVision. The PreVision system can achieve optimal buffer replacement by leveraging the deterministic characteristics of data access patterns, and it can also avoid redundant I/O operations by proactively evicting the pages that are no longer referenced. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that PreVision outperforms the existing out-of-core matrix computation systems and significantly reduces disk I/O operations.