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

Understanding the mixed precision strategy

The benefits of using lower-precision formats are crystal clear. Besides saving memory, the computing power required to handle data with lower precision is less than that needed to process numbers with higher precision.

One approach to accelerate the training process of machine learning models concerns employing a mixed precision strategy. Along the lines of Chapter 6, Simplifying the Model, we will understand this strategy by asking (and answering, of course) a couple of simple NH questions about this approach.

Note

When searching for information about reducing the precision of deep learning models, you may come across a term known as model quantization. Despite being related terms, the goal of mixed precision is quite different from model quantization. The former intends to accelerate the training process by employing reduced numeric precision formats. The latter focuses on reducing the complexity of trained models to use in the...