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

Pre-training and fine-tuning

There are two stages in NLP models that can be described as training. One is pre-training and the other is fine-tuning. In this section, we will discuss the main difference between these two concepts.

Pre-training is where we train a giant NLP model from scratch. In pre-training, we need to have a huge training dataset (for example, all the Wikipedia pages). It works as follows:

  1. We initialize the model weights.
  2. We partition the giant model into hundreds or thousands of GPUs via model parallelism.
  3. We feed the huge training dataset into the model-parallel training pipeline and train for several weeks or months.
  4. Once the model is converged to a good local minimum, we stop the training and call the model a pre-trained model.

By following the preceding steps, we can get a pre-trained NLP model.

Note that the pre-training process often takes huge amounts of computational resources and time. As of now, only big companies such as...