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

Why do we need an efficient data pipeline?

We’ll start this chapter by making you aware of the relevance of having an efficient data pipeline. In the next few subsections, you will understand what a data pipeline is and how it can impact the performance of the training process.

What is a data pipeline?

As you learned in Chapter 1, Deconstructing the Training Process, the training process is composed of four phases: forward, loss calculation, optimization, and backward. The training algorithm iterates on dataset samples until there’s a complete epoch. Nevertheless, there is an additional phase we excluded from that explanation: data loading.

The forward phase invokes data loading to get dataset samples to execute the training process. More specifically, the forward phase calls the data loading process on each iteration to get the data required to execute the current training step, as shown in Figure 5.1:

Figure 5.1 – Data loading process

Figure 5.1 – Data loading...