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

Why distribute the training on multiple CPUs?

At first sight, thinking about distributing the training process among multiple CPUs in a single machine sounds slightly confusing. After all, we could increase the number of threads used in the training process to allocate all available CPUs (computing cores).

However, as said by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a famous Brazilian poet, “In the middle of the road there was a stone. There was a stone in the middle of the road.” Let’s see what happens to the training process when we just increase the number of threads in a machine with multiple cores.

Why not increase the number of threads?

In Chapter 4, Using Specialized Libraries, we learned that PyTorch relies on OpenMP to accelerate the training process by employing the multithreading technique. OpenMP assigns threads to physical cores intending to improve the performance of the training process.

So, if we have a certain number of available computing cores...