apache/spark — pull request #1110 by mengxr (2014-06-17 23:48:45+00:00)
Title: [WIP][SPARK-2174][MLLIB] treeReduce and treeAggregate

In `reduce` and `aggregate`, the driver node spends linear time on the number of partitions. It becomes a bottleneck when there are many partitions and the data from each partition is big.

SPARK-1485 (#506) tracks the progress of implementing AllReduce on Spark. I did several implementations including butterfly, reduce + broadcast, and treeReduce + broadcast. treeReduce + BT broadcast seems to be right way to go for Spark. Using binary tree may introduce some overhead in communication, because the driver still need to coordinate on data shuffling. In my experiments, n -> sqrt(n) -> 1 gives the best performance in general, which is why I set "depth = 2" in MLlib algorithms. But it certainly needs more testing.

I left `treeReduce` and `treeAggregate` public for easy testing.