On-Demand Videos
Real-time OLAP databases are optimized for speed and often rely on tightly coupled storage-compute architectures using disks or SSDs. Decoupled architectures, which use cloud object storage, introduce an unavoidable tradeoff: cost efficiency at the expense of performance. This makes them unsuitable for databases that need to provide low-latency, real-time analytics, especially the new wave of LLM-powered dashboards, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and vector-embedding searches that thrive only when fresh data is milliseconds away. Can we achieve both cost efficiency and performance?
In this talk, we’ll explore the engineering challenges of extending Apache Pinot—a real-time OLAP system—onto cloud object storage while still maintaining sub-second P99 latencies.
We’ll dive into how we built an abstraction in Apache Pinot to make it agnostic to the location of data. We’ll explain how we can query data directly from the cloud (without needing to download the entire dataset, as with lazy-loading) while achieving sub-second latencies. We’ll cover the data fetch and optimization strategies we implemented, such as pipelining fetch and compute, prefetching, selective block fetches, index pinning, and more. We'll also share our latest work about integration with open table formats like iceberg, and how we will continue to achieve fast analytics directly on parquet files by implementing all the same techniques that apply to tiered storage.
The data lake is a fantastic, low-cost place to put data at rest for offline analytics, but we've built it under the terms of a terrible bargain: all that cheap storage at scale was a great thing, but we gave up schema management and transactions along the way. Apache Iceberg has emerged as king of the Open Table Formats to fix this very problem.
Built on the foundation of Parquet files, Iceberg adds a simple yet flexible metadata layer and integration with standard data catalogs to provide robust schema support and ACID transactions to the once ungoverned data lake. In this talk, we'll build Iceberg up from the basics, see how the read and write path work, and explore how it supports streaming data sources like Apache Kafka™. Then we'll see how Confluent's Tableflow brings Kafka together with open table formats like Iceberg and Delta Lake to make operational data in Kafka topics instantly visible to the data lake without the usual ETL—unifying the operational/analytical divide that has been with us for decades.
Storing data as Parquet files on S3 is increasingly used not just as a data lake but also as a lightweight feature store for ML training/inference or a document store for RAG. However, querying petabyte- to exabyte-scale data lakes directly from cloud object storage remains notoriously slow (e.g., latencies ranging from hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds on AWS S3).
In this talk, we show how architecture co-design, system-level optimizations, and workload-aware engineering can deliver over 1000× performance improvements for these workloads—without changing file formats, rewriting data paths, or provisioning expensive hardware.
We introduce a high-performance, low-latency S3 proxy layer powered by Alluxio, deployed atop hyperscale data lakes. This proxy delivers sub-millisecond Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB)—on par with Amazon S3 Express—while preserving compatibility with standard S3 APIs. In real-world benchmarks, a 50-node Alluxio cluster sustains over 1 million S3 queries per second, offering 50× the throughput of S3 Express for a single account, with no compromise in latency.
Beyond accelerating access to Parquet files byte-to-byte, we also offload partial Parquet processing from query engines via a pluggable interface into Alluxio. This eliminates the need for costly index scans and file parsing, enabling point queries with 0.3 microseconds latency and up to 3,000 QPS per instance (measured using a single-thread)—a 100× improvement over traditional query paths.
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OpenAI’s developer Developer Experience Engineer, Ankit Khare, provides practical insights for AI enthusiasts on effectively customizing and leveraging LLMs in various applications through preference tuning and fine-tuning.
In today’s AI-driven world, organizations face unprecedented demands for powerful AI infrastructure to fuel their model training and serving workloads. Performance bottlenecks, cost inefficiencies, and management complexities pose significant challenges for AI platform teams supporting large-scale model training and serving. On July 9, 2024, we introduced Alluxio Enterprise AI 3.2, a groundbreaking solution designed to address these critical issues in the ever-evolving AI landscape.
In this webinar, Shouwei Chen introduced exciting new features of Alluxio Enterprise AI 3.2:
- Leveraging GPU resources anywhere accessing remote data with the same local performance
- Enhanced I/O performance with 97%+ GPU utilization for popular language model training benchmarks
- Achieving the same performance as HPC storage on existing data lake without additional HPC storage infrastructure
- New Python FileSystem API to seamlessly integrate with Python applications like Ray
- Other new features, include advanced cache management, rolling upgrades, and CSI failover
As Trino users increasingly rely on cloud object storage for retrieving data, speed and cloud cost have become major challenges. The separation of compute and storage creates latency challenges when querying datasets; scanning data between storage and compute tiers becomes I/O bound. On the other hand, cloud API costs related to GET/LIST operations and cross-region data transfer add up quickly.
The newly introduced Trino file system cache by Alluxio aims to overcome the above challenges. In this session, Jianjian will dive into Trino data caching strategies, the latest test results, and discuss the multi-level caching architecture. This architecture makes Trino 10x faster for data lakes of any scale, from GB to EB.
What you will learn:
- Challenges relating to the speed and costs of running Trino in the cloud
- The new Trino file system cache feature overview, including the latest development status and test results
- A multi-level cache framework for maximized speed, including Trino file system cache and Alluxio distributed cache
- Real-world cases, including a large online payment firm and a top ridesharing company
- The future roadmap of Trino file system cache and Trino-Alluxio integration
Speed and efficiency are two requirements for the underlying infrastructure for machine learning model development. Data access can bottleneck end-to-end machine learning pipelines as training data volume grows and when large model files are more commonly used for serving. For instance, data loading can constitute nearly 80% of the total model training time, resulting in less than 30% GPU utilization. Also, loading large model files for deployment to production can be slow because of slow network or storage read operations. These challenges are prevalent when using popular frameworks like PyTorch, Ray, or HuggingFace, paired with cloud object storage solutions like S3 or GCS, or downloading models from the HuggingFace model hub.
In this presentation, Lu and Siyuan will offer comprehensive insights into improving speed and GPU utilization for model training and serving. You will learn:
- The data loading challenges hindering GPU utilization
- The reference architecture for running PyTorch and Ray jobs while reading data from S3, with benchmark results of training ResNet50 and BERT
- Real-world examples of boosting model performance and GPU utilization through optimized data access
From Caffe to MXNet, to PyTorch, and more, Xiande Cao, Senior Deep Learning Software Engineer Manager, will share his perspective on the evolution of deep learning frameworks.
Prefill in LLM inference is known to be resource-intensive, especially for long LLM inputs. While better scheduling can mitigate prefill’s impact, it would be fundamentally better to avoid (most of) prefill. This talk introduces our preliminary effort towards drastically minimizing prefill delay for LLM inputs that naturally reuse text chunks, such as in retrieval-augmented generation. While keeping the KV cache of all text chunks in memory is difficult, we show that it is possible to store them on cheaper yet slower storage. By improving the loading process of the reused KV caches, we can still significantly speed up prefill delay while maintaining the same generation quality.
Uber has numerous deep learning models, most of which are highly complex with many layers and a vast number of features. Understanding how these models work is challenging and demands significant resources to experiment with various training algorithms and feature sets. With ML explainability, the ML team aims to bring transparency to these models, helping to clarify their predictions and behavior. This transparency also assists the operations and legal teams in explaining the reasons behind specific prediction outcomes.
In this talk, Eric Wang will discuss the methods Uber used for explaining deep learning models and how we integrated these methods into the Uber AI Michelangelo ecosystem to support offline explaining.
Running AI/ML workloads in different clouds present unique challenges. The key to a manageable multi-cloud architecture is the ability to seamlessly access data across environments with high performance and low cost.
This webinar is designed for data platform engineers, data infra engineers, data engineers, and ML engineers who work with multiple data sources in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Chanchan and Bin will guide the audience through using Alluxio to greatly simplify data access and make model training and serving more efficient in these environments.
You will learn:
- How to access data in multi-region, hybrid, and multi-cloud like accessing a local file system
- How to run PyTorch to read datasets and write checkpoints to remote storage with Alluxio as the distributed data access layer
- Real-world examples and insights from tech giants like Uber, AliPay and more
Cloud-native model training jobs require fast data access to achieve shorter training cycles. Accessing data can be challenging when your datasets are distributed across different regions and clouds. Additionally, as GPUs remain scarce and expensive resources, it becomes more common to set up remote training clusters from where data resides. This multi-region/cloud scenario introduces the challenges of losing data locality, resulting in operational overhead, latency and expensive cloud costs.
In the third webinar of the multi-cloud webinar series, Chanchan and Shawn dive deep into:
- The data locality challenges in the multi-region/cloud ML pipeline
- Using a cloud-native distributed caching system to overcome these challenges
- The architecture and integration of PyTorch/Ray+Alluxio+S3 using POSIX or RESTful APIs
- Live demo with ResNet and BERT benchmark results showing performance gains and cost savings analysis
In this presentation, Bin Fan (VP of Open Source @ Alluxio) will address a critical challenge of optimizing data loading for distributed Python applications within AI/ML workloads in the cloud, focusing on popular frameworks like Ray and Hugging Face. Integration of Alluxio’s distributed caching for Python applications is accomplished using the fsspec interface, thus greatly improving data access speeds. This is particularly useful in machine learning workflows, where repeated data reloading across slow, unstable or congested networks can severely affect GPU efficiency and escalate operational costs.
Attendees can look forward to practical, hands-on demonstrations showcasing the tangible benefits of Alluxio’s caching mechanism across various real-world scenarios. These demos will highlight the enhancements in data efficiency and overall performance of data-intensive Python applications. This presentation is tailored for developers and data scientists eager to optimize their AI/ML workloads. Discover strategies to accelerate your data processing tasks, making them not only faster but also more cost-efficient.
As GenAI and AI continue to transform businesses, scaling these workloads requires optimized underlying infrastructure. A multi-cloud architecture allows organizations to leverage different cloud services to meet diverse workload demands while maximizing efficiency, reducing costs, and avoiding vendor lock-in. However, achieving a multi-cloud vision can be challenging.
In this webinar, Tarik will share how an agonistic data layer, like Alluxio, allows you to embrace the separation of storage from compute and simplify the adoption of multi-cloud for AI.
- Learn why leveraging multiple cloud providers is critical for balancing performance, scalability, and cost of your AI platform
- Discover how an agnostic data layer like Alluxio provides seamless data access in multi-cloud that bridges storage and compute without data replication
- Gain insights into real-world examples and best practices for deploying AI across on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments
2024 is gearing up to be an impactful year for AI and analytics. Join us on January 30, as Kevin Petrie (VP of Research at Eckerson Group) and Omid Razavi (SVP of Customer Success at Alluxio) share key trends that data and AI leaders should know. This event will efficiently guide you with market data and expert insights to drive successful business outcomes.
- Assess current and future trends in data and AI with industry experts
- Discover valuable insights and practical recommendations
- Learn best practices to make your enterprise data more accessible for both analytics and AI applications