Book Image

Distributed Machine Learning with Python

By : Guanhua Wang
Book Image

Distributed Machine Learning with Python

By: Guanhua Wang

Overview of this book

Reducing time cost in machine learning leads to a shorter waiting time for model training and a faster model updating cycle. Distributed machine learning enables machine learning practitioners to shorten model training and inference time by orders of magnitude. With the help of this practical guide, you'll be able to put your Python development knowledge to work to get up and running with the implementation of distributed machine learning, including multi-node machine learning systems, in no time. You'll begin by exploring how distributed systems work in the machine learning area and how distributed machine learning is applied to state-of-the-art deep learning models. As you advance, you'll see how to use distributed systems to enhance machine learning model training and serving speed. You'll also get to grips with applying data parallel and model parallel approaches before optimizing the in-parallel model training and serving pipeline in local clusters or cloud environments. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge and skills needed to build and deploy an efficient data processing pipeline for machine learning model training and inference in a distributed manner.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Data Parallelism
6
Section 2 – Model Parallelism
11
Section 3 – Advanced Parallelism Paradigms

On-device memory bottlenecks

Nowadays, CPU memory is often tens or hundreds of gigabytes in size. Compared to this huge host of memory, the GPU memory size is often quite limited. The following table shows the commonly used GPU memory sizes:

Figure 4.15 – Different GPU and on-device memory sizes

As shown in the preceding table, even with state-of-the-art GPUs such as the A100, the memory size is only 40 GB. More popular GPU choices, such as the NVIDIA 2080 or K80, only have a GPU memory size of around 10 GB.

When conducting DNN training, those generated intermediate results (for example, feature maps) are often orders of magnitude bigger than the original input data. Thus, it makes the GPU memory limitation more pronounced.

There are mainly two ways to reduce the memory footprint on the accelerators: recomputation and quantization. Let's take a look.