Book Image

Accelerate Model Training with PyTorch 2.X

By : Maicon Melo Alves
Book Image

Accelerate Model Training with PyTorch 2.X

By: Maicon Melo Alves

Overview of this book

Penned by an expert in High-Performance Computing (HPC) with over 25 years of experience, this book is your guide to enhancing the performance of model training using PyTorch, one of the most widely adopted machine learning frameworks. You’ll start by understanding how model complexity impacts training time before discovering distinct levels of performance tuning to expedite the training process. You’ll also learn how to use a new PyTorch feature to compile the model and train it faster, alongside learning how to benefit from specialized libraries to optimize the training process on the CPU. As you progress, you’ll gain insights into building an efficient data pipeline to keep accelerators occupied during the entire training execution and explore strategies for reducing model complexity and adopting mixed precision to minimize computing time and memory consumption. The book will get you acquainted with distributed training and show you how to use PyTorch to harness the computing power of multicore systems and multi-GPU environments available on single or multiple machines. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with a suite of techniques, approaches, and strategies to speed up training , so you can focus on what really matters—building stunning models!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Paving the Way
4
Part 2: Going Faster
10
Part 3: Going Distributed

A first look at distributed training

We’ll start this chapter by discussing the reasons for distributing the training process among multiple resources. Then, we’ll learn what resources are commonly used to execute this process.

When do we need to distribute the training process?

The most common reason to distribute the training process concerns accelerating the building process. Suppose the training process is taking a long time to complete, and we have multiple resources at hand. In that case, we should consider distributing the training process among these various resources to reduce the training time.

The second motivation for going distributed is related to memory leaks to load a large model in a single resource. In this situation, we rely on distributed training to allocate different parts of the large model into distinct devices or resources so that the model can be loaded into the system.

However, distributed training is not a silver bullet that solves...