Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Oral

Towards Scalable Distributed Training of Deep Learning on Public Cloud Clusters

Shaohuai Shi · Xianhao Zhou · Shutao Song · Xingyao Wang · Zilin Zhu · Xue Huang · Xinan Jiang · Feihu Zhou · Zhenyu Guo · Liqiang Xie · Rui Lan · Xianbin Ouyang · Yan Zhang · Jieqian Wei · Jing Gong · Weiliang Lin · Ping Gao · Peng Meng · Xiaomin Xu · Chenyang Guo · Bo Yang · Zhibo Chen · Yongjian Wu · Xiaowen Chu

Abstract:

Distributed training techniques have been widely deployed in large-scale deep models training on dense-GPU clusters. However, on public cloud clusters, due to the moderate inter-connection bandwidth between instances, traditional state-of-the-art distributed training systems cannot scale well in training large-scale models. In this paper, we propose a new computing and communication efficient top-k sparsification communication library for distributed training. To further improve the system scalability, we optimize I/O by proposing a simple yet efficient multi-level data caching mechanism and optimize the update operation by introducing a novel parallel tensor operator. Experimental results on a 16-node Tencent Cloud cluster (each node with 8 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs) show that our system achieves 25%-40% faster than existing state-of-the-art systems on CNNs and Transformer. We finally break the record on DAWNBench on training ResNet-50 to 93% top-5 accuracy on ImageNet.

Chat is not available.