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

Learning the fundamentals of parallelism strategies

In the previous section, we learned that the distributed training approach divides the whole training process into small parts. As a result, the entire training process can be solved in parallel because each of these small parts is executed simultaneously in distinct computing resources.

The parallelism strategy defines how to divide the training process into small parts. There are two main parallelism strategies: model and data parallelism. The following sections explain both.

Model parallelism

Model parallelism divides the set of operations that are executed during the training process into smaller subsets of computing tasks. By doing this, the distributed process can run these smaller subsets of operations in distinct computing resources, thus accelerating the entire training process.

It turns out that operations executed in the forward and backward phases are not independent of each other. In other words, the execution...