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 Machines

We’ve finally arrived at the last mile of our performance improvement journey. In this last stage, we will broaden our horizons and learn how to distribute the training process across multiple machines or servers. So, instead of using four or eight devices, we can use dozens or hundreds of computing resources to train our models.

An environment comprised of multiple connected servers is usually called a computing cluster or simply a cluster. Such environments are shared among multiple users and have technical particularities such as a high bandwidth and low latency network.

In this chapter, we’ll describe the characteristics of computing clusters that are more relevant to the distributed training process. After that, we will learn how to distribute the training process among multiple machines using Open MPI as the launcher and NCCL as the communication backend.

Here is what you will learn as part of this chapter:

  • The most...