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

Remembering numeric precision

Before diving into the benefits of adopting a mixed precision strategy, it is essential to ground you on numeric representation and common data types. Let’s start by remembering how computers represent numbers.

How do computers represent numbers?

A computer is a machine – endowed with finite resources – that’s designed to work on bits, the smallest unit of information it can manage. As numbers are infinite, computer designers had to put a lot of effort into finding a solution to represent this theoretical concept in a real machine.

To get the work done, computer designers needed to deal with three key factors regarding numeric representation:

  • Sign: Whether the number is positive or negative
  • Range: The interval of the represented numbers.
  • Precision: The number of decimal places.

Considering these elements, computer architects successfully defined numeric data types to represent not only integer...