Task Placement and Resource Allocation for Edge Machine Learning: A GNN-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Paradigm

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) tasks are one of the major workloads in today's edge computing networks. Existing edge-cloud schedulers allocate the requested amounts of resources to each task, falling short of best utilizing the limited edge resources for ML tasks. This paper proposes <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TapFinger</i> , a distributed scheduler for edge clusters that minimizes the total completion time of ML tasks through co-optimizing task placement and fine-grained multi-resource allocation. To learn the tasks’ uncertain resource sensitivity and enable distributed scheduling, we adopt multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and propose several techniques to make it efficient, including a heterogeneous graph attention network as the MARL backbone, a tailored task selection phase in the actor network, and the integration of Bayes’ theorem and masking schemes. We first implement a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">single-task scheduling</i> version, which schedules at most one task each time. Then we generalize to the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">multi-task scheduling</i> case, in which a sequence of tasks is scheduled simultaneously. Our design can mitigate the expanded decision space and yield fast convergence to optimal scheduling solutions. Extensive experiments using synthetic and test-bed ML task traces show that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TapFinger</i> can achieve up to 54.9% reduction in the average task completion time and improve resource efficiency as compared to state-of-the-art schedulers.