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

Modifying the application layer

The application layer is the starting point of the performance improvement journey. As we have complete control of the application code, we can change it without depending on anyone else. Thus, there is no better way to start the performance optimization process than working independently.

What can we change in the application layer?

You may wonder how we can modify the code to improve performance. Well, we can reduce model complexity, increase the batch size to optimize memory usage, compile the model to fuse operations and disable profiling functions to eliminate extra overhead in the training process.

Regardless of the changes applied to the application layer, we cannot sacrifice model accuracy in favor of performance improvement since this does not make sense. As the primary goal of a neural network is to solve problems, it would be meaningless to accelerate the building process of a useless model. Then, we must pay attention to model quality...