Methods for coaching giant neural networks

Pipeline parallelism splits a mannequin “vertically” by layer. It’s additionally attainable to “horizontally” cut up sure operations inside a layer, which is often referred to as Tensor Parallel coaching. For a lot of fashionable fashions (such because the Transformer), the computation bottleneck is multiplying an activation batch matrix with a big weight matrix. Matrix multiplication could be considered dot merchandise between pairs of rows and columns; it’s attainable to compute impartial dot merchandise on totally different GPUs, or to compute elements of every dot product on totally different GPUs and sum up the outcomes. With both technique, we will slice the burden matrix into even-sized “shards”, host every shard on a special GPU, and use that shard to compute the related a part of the general matrix product earlier than later speaking to mix the outcomes.

One instance is Megatron-LMwhich parallelizes matrix multiplications inside the Transformer’s self-attention and MLP layers. PTD-P makes use of tensor, knowledge, and pipeline parallelism; its pipeline schedule assigns a number of non-consecutive layers to every machine, lowering bubble overhead at the price of extra community communication.

Typically the enter to the community could be parallelized throughout a dimension with a excessive diploma of parallel computation relative to cross-communication. Sequence parallelism is one such thought, the place an enter sequence is cut up throughout time into a number of sub-examples, proportionally reducing peak reminiscence consumption by permitting the computation to proceed with extra granularly-sized examples.