A Comparison Of Platforms For Implementing And Running Very Large Scale Machine Learning Algorithms

We describe an extensive benchmark of platforms available to a user who wants to run a machine learning (ML) inference algorithm over a very large data set, but cannot find an existing implementation and thus must "roll her own" ML code. We have carefully chosen a set of five ML implementation tasks that involve learning relatively complex, hierarchical models. We completed those tasks on four different computational platforms, and using 70,000 hours of Amazon EC2 compute time, we carefully compared running times, tuning requirements, and ease-of-programming of each.