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

Adopting Mixed Precision

Scientific computing is a tool that’s used by scientists to push the limits of the known. Biology, physics, chemistry, and cosmology are examples of areas that rely on scientific computing to simulate and model the real world. In these fields of knowledge, numeric precision is paramount to yield coherent results. Since each decimal place matters in this case, scientific computing usually adopts double-precision data types to represent numbers with the highest possible precision.

However, that need for extra information comes with a price. The higher the numeric precision, the higher the computing power required to process those numbers. Besides that, higher precision also demands a higher memory space, increasing memory consumption.

In the face of those drawbacks, we must ask ourselves: do we need so much precision to build our models? Usually, we do not! In this sense, we can reduce the numeric precision for a few operations, thus bursting the...