HyPar: Towards Hybrid Parallelism for Deep Learning Accelerator Array

With the rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely used in many domains. To achieve high performance and energy efficiency, hardware acceleration (especially inference) of DNNs is intensively studied both in academia and industry. However, we still face two challenges: large DNN models and datasets, which incur frequent off-chip memory accesses; and the training of DNNs, which is not well-explored in recent accelerator designs. To truly provide high throughput and energy efficient acceleration for the training of deep and large models, we inevitably need to use multiple accelerators to explore the coarse-grain parallelism, compared to the fine-grain parallelism inside a layer considered in most of the existing architectures. It poses the key research question to seek the best organization of computation and dataflow among accelerators. In this paper, we propose a solution HyPar to determine layer-wise parallelism for deep neural network training with an array of DNN accelerators. HyPar partitions the feature map tensors (input and output), the kernel tensors, the gradient tensors, and the error tensors for the DNN accelerators. A partition constitutes the choice of parallelism for weighted layers. The optimization target is to search a partition that minimizes the total communication during training a complete DNN. To solve this problem, we propose a communication model to explain the source and amount of communications. Then, we use a hierarchical layer-wise dynamic programming method to search for the partition for each layer.Comment: To appear in the 2019 25th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 2019

Deep Learning at Scale with Nearest Neighbours Communications

As deep learning techniques become more and more popular, there is the need to move these applications from the data scientist’s Jupyter notebook to efficient and reliable enterprise solutions. Moreover, distributed training of deep learning models will happen more and more outside the well-known borders of cloud and HPC infrastructure and will move to edge and mobile platforms. Current techniques for distributed deep learning have drawbacks in both these scenarios, limiting their long-term applicability. After a critical review of the established techniques for Data Parallel training from both a distributed computing and deep learning perspective, a novel approach based on nearest-neighbour communications is presented in order to overcome some of the issues related to mainstream approaches, such as global communication patterns. Moreover, in order to validate the proposed strategy, the Flexible Asynchronous Scalable Training (FAST) framework is introduced, which allows to apply the nearest-neighbours communications approach to a deep learning framework of choice. Finally, a relevant use-case is deployed on a medium-scale infrastructure to demonstrate both the framework and the methodology presented. Training convergence and scalability results are presented and discussed in comparison to a baseline defined by using state-of-the-art distributed training tools provided by a well-known deep learning framework