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 options do we have?

Once we have decided to accelerate the training process of a model, we can take two directions, as illustrated in Figure 2.1:

Figure 2.1 – Approaches to accelerating the training phase

Figure 2.1 – Approaches to accelerating the training phase

In the first option (Modify the software stack), we go through each layer of the software stack used to train a model to seek opportunities to improve the training process. In simpler words, we can change the application code, install and use a specialized library, or enable a special capability regarding the operating system or container environment.

This first approach relies on having profound knowledge of performance tuning techniques. In addition, it demands a high sense of investigation to identify bottlenecks and apply the most suitable solution to overcome them. Thus, this approach is about harnessing the most hardware and software resources by extracting the maximum performance of the computing system.

Nevertheless, remark that...