Cyclades: Conflict-free Asynchronous Machine Learning

We present CYCLADES, a general framework for parallelizing stochastic optimization algorithms in a shared memory setting. CYCLADES is asynchronous during model updates, and requires no memory locking mechanisms, similar to HOGWILD!-type algorithms. Unlike HOGWILD!, CYCLADES introduces no conflicts during parallel execution, and offers a black-box analysis for provable speedups across a large family of algorithms. Due to its inherent cache locality and conflictfree nature, our multi-core implementation of CYCLADES consistently outperforms HOGWILD!-type algorithms on sufficiently sparse datasets, leading to up to 40% speedup gains compared to HOGWILD!, and up to 5⇥ gains over asynchronous implementations of variance reduction algorithms.