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

Training with Multiple CPUs

When accelerating the model-building process, we immediately think of machines endowed with GPU devices. What if I told you that running distributed training on machines equipped only with multicore processors is possible and advantageous?

Although the performance improvement obtained from GPUs is incomparable, we should not disdain the computing power provided by modern CPUs. Processor vendors have continuously increased the number of computing cores on CPUs, besides creating sophisticated mechanisms to treat access contention to shared resources.

Using CPUs to run distributed training is especially interesting for cases where we do not have easy access to GPU devices. Thus, learning this topic is vital to enrich our knowledge about distributed training.

In this chapter, we show how to execute the distributed training process on multiple CPUs in a single machine by adopting a general approach and using the Intel oneCCL backend.

Here is what...