Date of Award
2017
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Graduate Group
Computer and Information Science
First Advisor
Ali Jadbabaie
Abstract
Over the past twenty years, we have witnessed an unprecedented growth in data, inaugurating the
so-called "Big Data" Epoch. Throughout these years, the exponential growth in the power of computer
chips forecasted by Moore's Law has allowed us to increasingly handle such growing data
progression. However, due to the physical limitations on the size of transistors we have already
reached the computational limits of traditional microprocessors' architecture.Therefore, we either
need conceptually new computers or distributed models of computation to allow processors to solve
Big Data problems in a collaborative manner.
The purpose of this thesis is to show that decentralized optimization is capable of addressing our
growing computational demands by exploiting the power of coordinated data processing. In particular,
we propose an exact distributed Newton method for two important challenges in large-scale
optimization: Network Flow and Empirical Risk Minimization.
The key observation behind our method is related to the symmetric diagonal dominant structure
of the Hessian of dual functions correspondent to the aforementioned problems. Consequently, one
can calculate the Newton direction by solving symmetric diagonal dominant (SDD) systems in a
decentralized fashion.
We first propose a fully distributed SDD solver based on a recursive approximation of SDD matrix
inverses with a collection of specifically structured distributed matrices. To improve the precision of
the algorithm, we then apply Richardson Preconditioners arriving at an efficient algorithm capable
of approximating the solution of SDD system with any arbitrary precision.
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Our second fully distributed SDD solver significantly improves the computational performance of
the rst algorithm by utilizing Chebyshev polynomials for an approximation of the SDD matrix
inverse. The particular choice of Chebyshev polynomials is motivated by their extremal properties
and their recursive relation.
We then explore mixed strategies for solving SDD systems by slightly relaxing the decentralization
requirements. Roughly speaking, by allowing for one computer to aggregate some particular information
from all others, one can gain quite surprising computational benefits. The key idea is to
construct a spectral sparsifier of the underlying graph of computers by using local communication
between them.
Finally, we apply these solvers for calculating the Newton direction for the dual function of Network
Flow and Empirical Risk Minimization. On the theoretical side, we establish quadratic convergence
rate for our algorithms surpassing all existing techniques. On the empirical side, we verify our
superior performance in a set of extensive numerical simulations.
Recommended Citation
Tutunov, Rasul, "Fully Distributed And Mixed Symmetric Diagonal Dominant Solvers For Large Scale Optimization" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2617.
https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2617