SuperNeurons: Dynamic GPU Memory Management for Training Deep Neural Networks

Conference · Wed Feb 28 04:00:00 EST 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3178487.3178491· OSTI ID:1525779

Wang, Linnan ^[1]; Ye, Jinmian ^[2]; Zhao, Yiyang ^[2]; Wu, Wei ^[3]; Li, Ang ^[4]; Song, Shuaiwen ^[4]; Xu, Zenglin ^[2]; Kraska, Tim ^[5]

---

1. Brown University
2. University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
3. Los Alamos National Laboratory
4. BATTELLE (PACIFIC NW LAB)
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Going deeper and wider in neural architectures improves their accuracy, while the limited GPU DRAM places an undesired restriction on the network design domain. Deep Learning (DL) practitioners either need to change to less de- sired network architectures, or nontrivially dissect a network across multiGPUs. These distract DL practitioners from concentrating on their original machine learning tasks. We present SuperNeurons: a dynamic GPU memory scheduling runtime to enable the network training far beyond the GPU DRAM capacity. SuperNeurons features 3 memory optimizations, Liveness Analysis, Unified Tensor Pool, and Cost-Aware Recomputation; together they effectively reduce the network-wide peak memory usage down to the maximal memory usage among layers. We also address the performance issues in these memory-saving techniques. Given the limited GPU DRAM, SuperNeurons not only provisions the necessary memory for the training, but also dynamically allocates the memory for convolution workspaces to achieve the high performance. Evaluations against Caffe, Torch, MXNet and TensorFlow have demonstrated that SuperNeurons trains at least 3.2432 deeper network than current ones with the leading performance. Particularly, SuperNeurons can train ResNet2500 that has 104 basic network layers on a 12GB K40c.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1525779
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-143407
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English