PowerSGD: Practical Low-Rank Gradient Compression for Distributed Optimization

We study lossy gradient compression methods to alleviate the communication bottleneck in data-parallel distributed optimization. Despite the significant attention received, current compression schemes either do not scale well, or fail to achieve the target test accuracy. We propose a new low-rank gradient compressor based on power iteration that can i) compress gradients rapidly, ii) efficiently aggregate the compressed gradients using all-reduce, and iii) achieve test performance on par with SGD. The proposed algorithm is the only method evaluated that achieves consistent wall-clock speedups when benchmarked against regular SGD using highly optimized off-the-shelf tools for distributed communication. We demonstrate reduced training times for convolutional networks as well as LSTMs on common datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/epfml/powersgd