Alibaba

Qi-Wei Chen, Huan Zhao, Wei Li, Pi-Pei Huang, Wenwu Ou

Deep learning based methods have been widely used in industrial recommendation systems (RSs). Previous works adopt an Embedding&MLP paradigm: raw features are embedded into low-dimensional vectors, which are then fed on to MLP for final recommendations. However, most of these works just concatenate different features, ignoring the sequential nature of users' behaviors. In this paper, we propose to use the powerful Transformer model to capture the sequential signals underlying users' behavior sequences for recommendation in Alibaba. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model, which is then deployed online at Taobao and obtain significant improvements in online Click-Through-Rate (CTR) comparing to two baselines.

Shutian Luo, Huanle Xu, Chengzhi Lu, Kejiang Ye, Guoyao Xu, Liping Zhang, Yu Ding, Jian He, Chengzhong Xu

Loosely-coupled and light-weight microservices running in containers are replacing monolithic applications gradually. Understanding the characteristics of microservices is critical to make good use of microservice architectures. However, there is no comprehensive study about microservice and its related systems in production environments so far. In this paper, we present a solid analysis of large-scale deployments of microservices at Alibaba clusters. Our study focuses on the characterization of microservice dependency as well as its runtime performance. We conduct an in-depth anatomy of microservice call graphs to quantify the difference between them and traditional DAGs of data-parallel jobs. In particular, we observe that microservice call graphs are heavy-tail distributed and their topology is similar to a tree and moreover, many microservices are hot-spots. We reveal three types of meaningful call dependency that can be utilized to optimize microservice designs. Our investigation on microservice runtime performance indicates most microservices are much more sensitive to CPU interference than memory interference. To synthesize more representative microservice traces, we build a mathematical model to simulate call graphs. Experimental results demonstrate our model can well preserve those graph properties observed from Alibaba traces.

Kun Qian, Yongqing Xi, Jiamin Cao, Jiaqi Gao, Yichi Xu, Yu Guan, Binzhang Fu, Xue-Mei Shi, Fangbo Zhu, Rui Miao, Chao Wang, Peng Wang, Pengcheng Zhang, Xianlong Zeng, Eddie Ruan, Zhiping Yao, En-Nan Zhai, Dennis Cai

This paper presents HPN, Alibaba Cloud's data center network for large language model (LLM) training. Due to the differences between LLMs and general cloud computing (e.g., in terms of traffic patterns and fault tolerance), traditional data center networks are not well-suited for LLM training. LLM training produces a small number of periodic, bursty flows (e.g., 400Gbps) on each host. This characteristic of LLM training predisposes Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) to hash polarization, causing issues such as uneven traffic distribution. HPN introduces a 2-tier, dual-plane architecture capable of interconnecting 15K GPUs within one Pod, typically accommodated by the traditional 3-tier Clos architecture. Such a new architecture design not only avoids hash polarization but also greatly reduces the search space for path selection. Another challenge in LLM training is that its requirement for GPUs to complete iterations in synchronization makes it more sensitive to singlepoint failure (typically occurring on ToR). HPN proposes a new dual-ToR design to replace the single-ToR in traditional data center networks. HPN has been deployed in our production for more than eight months. We share our experience in designing, and building HPN, as well as the operational lessons of HPN in production.

Yingwei Ma, Qingping Yang, Rongyu Cao, Bin-Hua Li, Fei Huang, Yong-Bin Li

This paper presents Alibaba LingmaAgent, a novel Automated Software Engineering method designed to comprehensively understand and utilize whole software repositories for issue resolution. Deployed in TONGYI Lingma, an IDE-based coding assistant developed by Alibaba Cloud, LingmaAgent addresses the limitations of existing LLM-based agents that primarily focus on local code information. Our approach introduces a top-down method to condense critical repository information into a knowledge graph, reducing complexity, and employs a Monte Carlo tree search based strategy enabling agents to explore and understand entire repositories. We guide agents to summarize, analyze, and plan using repository-level knowledge, allowing them to dynamically acquire information and generate patches for real-world GitHub issues. In extensive experiments, LingmaAgent demonstrated significant improvements, achieving an 18.5% relative improvement on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark compared to SWE-agent. In production deployment and evaluation at Alibaba Cloud, LingmaAgent automatically resolved 16.9% of in-house issues faced by development engineers, and solved 43.3% of problems after manual intervention. Additionally, we have open-sourced a Python prototype of LingmaAgent for reference by other industrial developers 1. In fact, LingmaAgent has been used as a developed reference by many subsequently agents.

Jie Lu, Jiaqi Gao, Fei Feng, Zhiqiang He, Menglei Zheng, Kun Liu, Junxian He, Binbin Liao, Suwei Xu, Ke Sun, Yongjia Mo, Qinghua Peng, Jilie Luo, Qingxu Li, Gang Lu, Zishu Wang, Jianbo Dong, Kunling He, Sheng Cheng, Jiamin Cao, Hairong Jiao, Pengcheng Zhang, Shu Ma, Lingjun Zhu, Chao Shi, Yangming Zhang, Yiquan Chen, Wei Wang, Shuhong Zhu, Xingru Li, Qiang Wang, Jiang Liu, Chao Wang, Wei Lin, En-Nan Zhai, Jie-Sheng Wu, Qiang Liu, Binzhang Fu, Dennis Cai

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in cloud environments has intensified the demand for high-performance AI training and inference, where Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) plays a critical role. However, existing RDMA virtualization solutions, such as Single-Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV), face significant limitations in scalability, performance, and stability. These issues include lengthy container initialization times, hardware resource constraints, and inefficient traffic steering. To address these challenges, we propose Stellar, a new generation RDMA network for cloud AI. Stellar introduces three key innovations: Para-Virtualized Direct Memory Access (PVDMA) for on-demand memory pinning, extended Memory Translation Table (eMTT) for optimized GPU Direct RDMA (GDR) performance, and RDMA Packet Spray for efficient multi-path utilization. Deployed in our large-scale AI clusters, Stellar spins up virtual devices in seconds, reduces container initialization time by 15 times, and improves LLM training speed by up to 14%. Our evaluations demonstrate that Stellar significantly outperforms existing solutions, offering a scalable, stable, and high-performance RDMA network for cloud AI.