MOPAR: A Model Partitioning Framework for Deep Learning Inference Services on Serverless Platforms

Abstract

With its elastic power and a pay-as-you-go cost model, the deployment of deep learning inference services (DLISs) on serverless platforms is emerging as a prevalent trend. However, the varying resource requirements of different layers in DL models hinder resource utilization and increase costs, when DLISs are deployed as a single function on serverless platforms. To tackle this problem, we propose a model partitioning framework called MOPAR. This work is based on the two resource usage patterns of DLISs: global differences and local similarity, due to the presence of resource dominant (RD) operators and layer stacking. Considering these patterns, MOPAR adopts a hybrid approach that initially divides the DL model vertically into multiple slices composed of similar layers to improve resource efficiency. Slices containing RD operators are further partitioned into multiple sub-slices, enabling parallel optimization to reduce inference latency. Moreover, MOPAR comprehensively employs data compression and share-memory techniques to offset the additional time introduced by communication between slices. We implement a prototype of MOPAR and evaluate its efficacy using three categories of 8 DL models on OpenFaaS and AWS Lambda. The experiment results show that MOPAR can improve the resource efficiency of DLISs by 27.62% on average, while reducing latency by about 5.52%.