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 how to distribute the training process across multiple GPUs located on multiple machines. We used Open MPI as the launch provider and NCCL as the communication backend.

We decided to use Open MPI as the launcher because it provides an easy and elegant way to create distributed processes on remote machines. Although Open MPI can also be employed like the communication backend, it is preferable to adopt NCCL since it has the most optimized implementation of collective operations for NVIDIA GPUs.

Results showed that the distributed training with 16 GPUs on two machines was 70% faster than running with 8 GPUs on a single machine. The model accuracy decreased from 68.82% to 63.73%, which is expected since we have doubled the number of model replicas in the distributed training process.

This chapter ends our journey about learning how to accelerate the training process with PyTorch. More than knowing how to apply techniques and methods to speed...