Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown to be powerful classification
tools in tasks that range from check reading to medical diagnosis, reaching
close to human perception, and in some cases surpassing it. However, the
problems to solve are becoming larger and more complex, which translates to
larger CNNs, leading to longer training times that not even the adoption of
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) could keep up to. This problem is partially
solved by using more processing units and distributed training methods that are
offered by several frameworks dedicated to neural network training. However,
these techniques do not take full advantage of the possible parallelization
offered by CNNs and the cooperative use of heterogeneous devices with different
processing capabilities, clock speeds, memory size, among others. This paper
presents a new method for the parallel training of CNNs that can be considered
as a particular instantiation of model parallelism, where only the
convolutional layer is distributed. In fact, the convolutions processed during
training (forward and backward propagation included) represent from 60-90\%
of global processing time. The paper analyzes the influence of network size,
bandwidth, batch size, number of devices, including their processing
capabilities, and other parameters. Results show that this technique is capable
of diminishing the training time without affecting the classification
performance for both CPUs and GPUs. For the CIFAR-10 dataset, using a CNN with
two convolutional layers, and 500 and 1500 kernels, respectively, best
speedups achieve 3.28× using four CPUs and 2.45× with three GPUs.
Modern imaging datasets, larger and more complex than CIFAR-10 will certainly
require more than 60-90\% of processing time calculating convolutions, and
speedups will tend to increase accordingly