A Case for Offloading Federated Learning Server on Smart NIC

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning approach where local weight parameters trained by clients locally are aggregated as global parameters by a server. The global parameters can be trained without uploading privacy-sensitive raw data owned by clients to the server. The aggregation on the server is simply done by averaging the local weight parameters, so it is an I/O intensive task where a network processing accounts for a large portion compared to the computation. The network processing workload further increases as the number of clients increases. To mitigate the network processing workload, in this paper, the federated learning server is offloaded to NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU which is a smart NIC (Network Interface Card) that has eight processing cores. Dedicated processing cores are assigned by DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) for receiving the local weight parameters and sending the global parameters. The aggregation task is parallelized by exploiting multiple cores available on the DPU. To further improve the performance, an approximated design that eliminates an exclusive access control between the computation threads is also implemented. Evaluation results show that the federated learning server on the DPU accelerates the execution time by 1.32 times compared with that on the host CPU with a negligible accuracy loss.