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Title: Exploring Flexible Communications for Streamlining DNN Ensemble Training Pipelines

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1435221· OSTI ID:1435221
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [2]
  1. North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC (United States)
  2. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Computer Science and Mathematics Division

Parallel training of a Deep Neural Network (DNN) ensemble on a cluster of nodes is a common practice to train multiple models in order to construct a model with a higher prediction accuracy. Existing ensemble training pipelines can perform a great deal of redundant operations, resulting in unnecessary CPU usage, or even poor pipeline performance. In order to remove these redundancies, we need pipelines with more communication flexibility than existing DNN frameworks can provide. This project investigates a series of designs to improve pipeline flexibility and adaptivity, while also increasing performance. We implement our designs using Tensorflow with Horovod, and test it using several large DNNs in a large scale GPU cluster, Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab. Our results show that the CPU time spent during training is reduced by 2-11X. Furthermore, our implementation can achieve up to 10X speedups when CPU core limits are imposed. Our best pipeline also reduces the average power draw of the ensemble training process by 5-16% when compared to the baseline.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1435221
Report Number(s):
ORNL/TM-2018/817
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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