Stannis: Low-Power Acceleration of DNN Training Using Computational Storage Devices

Computational storage devices enable in-storage processing of data in place. These devices contain 64-bit application processors and hardware accelerators that can help improving performance and saving power by reducing or eliminating data movement between host computers and storage units. This paper proposes a framework, named Stannis, for distributed in-storage training of deep neural networks on clusters of computational storage devices. This in-storage processing style of training ensures that private data never leaves the storage while fully controlling the public sharing of data. The Stannis framework distributes the workload based on the processing power of each worker by determining the proper batch size for each node. Stannis also ensures the availability of input data for all nodes to avoid rank stall while maximizing the utilization and overall processing speed. Experimental results show up to 2.7x speedup and 69% reduction in energy consumption with no significant loss in accuracy.