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

What is a computing cluster?

A computing cluster is a system of powerful servers interconnected by a high-performance network, as shown in Figure 11.1. This environment can be provisioned on-premises or in the cloud:

Figure 11.1 – A computing cluster

Figure 11.1 – A computing cluster

The computing power provided by these machines is combined to solve complex problems or to execute highly intensive computing tasks. A computing cluster is also known as a high-performance computing (HPC) system.

Each server has powerful computing resources such as multiple CPUs and GPUs, fast memory devices, ultra-fast disks, and special network adapters. Moreover, a computing cluster often has a parallel filesystem, which provides high transfer I/O rates.

Although not formally defined, we conventionally use the term “cluster” to reference environments comprised of four machines at least. Some computing clusters have a half-dozen machines, while others have more than two or three...