209,673 research outputs found
Scalable Distributed DNN Training using TensorFlow and CUDA-Aware MPI: Characterization, Designs, and Performance Evaluation
TensorFlow has been the most widely adopted Machine/Deep Learning framework.
However, little exists in the literature that provides a thorough understanding
of the capabilities which TensorFlow offers for the distributed training of
large ML/DL models that need computation and communication at scale. Most
commonly used distributed training approaches for TF can be categorized as
follows: 1) Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC), 2) gRPC+X: X=(InfiniBand
Verbs, Message Passing Interface, and GPUDirect RDMA), and 3) No-gRPC: Baidu
Allreduce with MPI, Horovod with MPI, and Horovod with NVIDIA NCCL. In this
paper, we provide an in-depth performance characterization and analysis of
these distributed training approaches on various GPU clusters including the Piz
Daint system (6 on Top500). We perform experiments to gain novel insights along
the following vectors: 1) Application-level scalability of DNN training, 2)
Effect of Batch Size on scaling efficiency, 3) Impact of the MPI library used
for no-gRPC approaches, and 4) Type and size of DNN architectures. Based on
these experiments, we present two key insights: 1) Overall, No-gRPC designs
achieve better performance compared to gRPC-based approaches for most
configurations, and 2) The performance of No-gRPC is heavily influenced by the
gradient aggregation using Allreduce. Finally, we propose a truly CUDA-Aware
MPI Allreduce design that exploits CUDA kernels and pointer caching to perform
large reductions efficiently. Our proposed designs offer 5-17X better
performance than NCCL2 for small and medium messages, and reduces latency by
29% for large messages. The proposed optimizations help Horovod-MPI to achieve
approximately 90% scaling efficiency for ResNet-50 training on 64 GPUs.
Further, Horovod-MPI achieves 1.8X and 3.2X higher throughput than the native
gRPC method for ResNet-50 and MobileNet, respectively, on the Piz Daint
cluster.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to IEEE IPDPS 2019 for peer-revie
Learning Background-Aware Correlation Filters for Visual Tracking
Correlation Filters (CFs) have recently demonstrated excellent performance in
terms of rapidly tracking objects under challenging photometric and geometric
variations. The strength of the approach comes from its ability to efficiently
learn - "on the fly" - how the object is changing over time. A fundamental
drawback to CFs, however, is that the background of the object is not be
modelled over time which can result in suboptimal results. In this paper we
propose a Background-Aware CF that can model how both the foreground and
background of the object varies over time. Our approach, like conventional CFs,
is extremely computationally efficient - and extensive experiments over
multiple tracking benchmarks demonstrate the superior accuracy and real-time
performance of our method compared to the state-of-the-art trackers including
those based on a deep learning paradigm
Customer purchase behavior prediction in E-commerce: a conceptual framework and research agenda
Digital retailers are experiencing an increasing number of transactions coming from their consumers online, a consequence of the convenience in buying goods via E-commerce platforms. Such interactions compose complex behavioral patterns which can be analyzed through predictive analytics to enable businesses to understand consumer needs. In this abundance of big data and possible tools to analyze them, a systematic review of the literature is missing. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review of recent research dealing with customer purchase prediction in the E-commerce context. The main contributions are a novel analytical framework and a research agenda in the field. The framework reveals three main tasks in this review, namely, the prediction of customer intents, buying sessions, and purchase decisions. Those are followed by their employed predictive methodologies and are analyzed from three perspectives. Finally, the research agenda provides major existing issues for further research in the field of purchase behavior prediction online
Optimized Broadcast for Deep Learning Workloads on Dense-GPU InfiniBand Clusters: MPI or NCCL?
Dense Multi-GPU systems have recently gained a lot of attention in the HPC
arena. Traditionally, MPI runtimes have been primarily designed for clusters
with a large number of nodes. However, with the advent of MPI+CUDA applications
and CUDA-Aware MPI runtimes like MVAPICH2 and OpenMPI, it has become important
to address efficient communication schemes for such dense Multi-GPU nodes. This
coupled with new application workloads brought forward by Deep Learning
frameworks like Caffe and Microsoft CNTK pose additional design constraints due
to very large message communication of GPU buffers during the training phase.
In this context, special-purpose libraries like NVIDIA NCCL have been proposed
for GPU-based collective communication on dense GPU systems. In this paper, we
propose a pipelined chain (ring) design for the MPI_Bcast collective operation
along with an enhanced collective tuning framework in MVAPICH2-GDR that enables
efficient intra-/inter-node multi-GPU communication. We present an in-depth
performance landscape for the proposed MPI_Bcast schemes along with a
comparative analysis of NVIDIA NCCL Broadcast and NCCL-based MPI_Bcast. The
proposed designs for MVAPICH2-GDR enable up to 14X and 16.6X improvement,
compared to NCCL-based solutions, for intra- and inter-node broadcast latency,
respectively. In addition, the proposed designs provide up to 7% improvement
over NCCL-based solutions for data parallel training of the VGG network on 128
GPUs using Microsoft CNTK.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure
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