The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the past decade, and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learning workload across multiple machines, and turning the centralized into a distributed system. These distributed systems present new challenges: first and foremost, the efficient parallelization of the training process and the creation of a coherent model. This article provides an extensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges and opportunities of distributed machine learning over conventional (centralized) machine learning, discussing the techniques used for distributed machine learning, and providing an overview of the systems that are available.

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The Eclipse platform was originally designed for building an integrated development environment for object-oriented applications. Over the years it has developed into a vibrant ecosystem of platforms, toolkits, libraries, modeling frameworks, and tools that support various languages and programming styles. The sixth ETX workshop provides a platform for researchers and practitioners to transfer knowledge about the Eclipse Platform and exchange new ideas. It is held in Portland, OR on October 21, 2014 and is co-located with SPLASH 2014. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).@en