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

Demystifying the multi-GPU environment

A multi-GPU environment is a computing system with more than one GPU device. Although multiple interconnected machines with just one GPU can be considered a multi-GPU environment, we usually employ this term to describe environments with two or more GPUs per machine.

To understand how this environment works under the hood, we need to learn about the connectivity of the devices and technologies that are adopted to provide efficient communication across multiple GPUs.

However, before we dive into these topics, we will answer a disquieting question that has probably come to your mind: will we have access to an expensive environment like that? Yes, we will. But first, let’s briefly discuss the increasing popularity of multi-GPU environments.

The popularity of multi-GPU environments

Going back 10 years ago, it was inconceivable to think of a machine with more than one GPU. Besides the high cost of this device, the applicability of...