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 environment layer

The environment layer comprises the machine learning framework and all the software needed to support its execution, such as libraries, compilers, and auxiliary tools.

What can we change in the environment layer?

As we discussed before, we may not have the necessary permission to change anything in the environment layer. This restriction depends on the type of environment we use to train the model. In third-party environments, such as notebook’s online services, we do not have the flexibility to make advanced configurations, such as downloading, compiling, and installing a specialized library. We can upgrade a package or install a new library, but nothing beyond that.

To overcome this restriction, we commonly use containers. Containers allow us to configure anything we need to run our application without requiring the support or permission of everyone else. Obviously, we are talking about the environment layer and not about the execution...