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

Accelerating data loading

Accelerating data loading is crucial to get an efficient data pipeline. In general, the following two changes are enough to get the work done:

  • Optimizing a data transfer between the CPU and GPU
  • Increasing the number of workers in the data pipeline

Putting it that way, these changes may sound tougher to implement than they are. Making these changes is quite simple – we just need to add a couple of parameters when creating the DataLoader instance for the data pipeline. We will cover this in the following subsections.

Optimizing a data transfer to the GPU

To transfer data from main memory to the GPU, and vice versa, the device driver must ask the operating system to pin or lock a portion of memory. After receiving access to that pinned memory, the device driver starts to copy data from the original memory location to the GPU, but using the pinned memory as a staging area:

Figure 5.6 – Data transfer between main memory and GPU

Figure 5.6 – Data transfer...