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

State-of-the-art hardware

Due to the huge computation power needed for training giant NLP models, we usually use a state-of-the-art hardware accelerator to do the NLP model training. In the following sections, we will look into some of the best GPUs and hardware links from NVIDIA.

P100, V100, and DGX-1

Tesla P100 GPU and Volta V100 GPU are the best GPUs launched by NVIDIA. Each P100/V100 GPU has the following:

  • 5–8 teraflops of double-precision computation power
  • 16 GB on-device memory
  • 700 GB/s high bandwidth memory I/O
  • NVLink-optimized

As per the specification listed in the preceding list, each P100/V100 GPU has a huge amount of computation power. There is an even more powerful machine that includes eight P100/V100 GPUs inside a single box. The eight-P100/V100-GPU box is called DGX-1.

DGX-1 is designed for high-performance computation. When embedding eight P100/V100 GPUs inside a single box, the cross-GPU network bandwidth becomes the main...