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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned that distributing the training process on multiple computing cores can be more advantageous than increasing the number of threads used in traditional training. This happens because PyTorch can face a limit on the parallelism level employed in the regular training process.

To distribute the training among multiple computing cores located in a single machine, we can use Gloo, a simple communication backend that comes by default with PyTorch. The results showed that the distributed training with Gloo achieved a performance improvement of 25% while retaining the same model accuracy.

We also learned that oneCCL, an Intel collective communication library, can accelerate the training process even more when executed on Intel platforms. With Intel oneCCL as the communication backend, we reduced the training time by more than 40%. If we are willing to reduce the model accuracy a little bit, it is possible to train the model two times faster.

In the...