[](https://travis-ci.org/dmlc/ps-lite)

Introduction

ps-lite is a high-performance implementation of the parameter server framework. It provides simple yet powerful APIs. For example, a worker node can communicate with the server nodes via

• Push(keys, values): push a list of (key, value) pairs to the server nodes
• Pull(keys): pull the values from servers for a given key list
• Wait: wait a push or pull finished.

A simple example:

  std::vector<uint64_t> key = {1, 3, 5};
  std::vector<float> val = {1, 1, 1};
  std::vector<float> recv_val;

  ps::KVWorker<float> w;
  w.Wait(w.Push(key, val));
  w.Wait(w.Pull(key, &recv_val));

More features:

• Flexible and high-performance communication: zero-copy push/pull, supporting dynamic length value, user-defined filters for communication compression
• Server-side programming: supporting user-defined handles on server nodes
• Flexible data consistency control via dependency DAG, allowing various consistency models such as eventual consistency, bounded delay, and BSP.

ps-lite is a part of the DMLC project. It is licensed under Apache 2.0.

How to build

ps-lite requires a C++11 compiler such as g++ >= 4.8 and git. You can install them via

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git

for Ubuntu >= 13.10. Instructions for older Ubuntu, Centos, Mac Os X.

Then clone and build

git clone https://github.com/dmlc/ps-lite
cd ps-lite && make deps -j4 && make -j4

Documents

• API Documents
• Tutorials
• Open source projects using ps-lite
  • Wormhole for distributed linear method, factorization machine, etc
  • CXXNET and Minverva for distributed deep neural networks.
• Research papers
  1. Mu Li, Dave Andersen, Alex Smola, Junwoo Park, Amr Ahmed, Vanja Josifovski, James Long, Eugene Shekita, Bor-Yiing Su. Scaling Distributed Machine Learning with the Parameter Server. In Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2014
  2. Mu Li, Dave Andersen, Alex Smola, and Kai Yu. Communication Efficient Distributed Machine Learning with the Parameter Server. In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2014