The OARF Benchmark Suite: Characterization and Implications for Federated Learning Systems

Abstract

This article presents and characterizes an Open Application Repository for Federated Learning (OARF), a benchmark suite for federated machine learning systems. Previously available benchmarks for federated learning (FL) have focused mainly on synthetic datasets and use a limited number of applications. OARF mimics more realistic application scenarios with publicly available datasets as different data silos in image, text, and structured data. Our characterization shows that the benchmark suite is diverse in data size, distribution, feature distribution, and learning task complexity. The extensive evaluations with reference implementations show the future research opportunities for important aspects of FL systems. We have developed reference implementations, and evaluated the important aspects of FL, including model accuracy, communication cost, throughput, and convergence time. Through these evaluations, we discovered some interesting findings such as FL can effectively increase end-to-end throughput. The code of OARF is publicly available on GitHub. 1