Oral: Scaling Distributed Training with Adaptive Summation

Apr 4, 2021

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Data parallelism is a common way to parallelize stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the loss of convergence at large minibatch sizes limits the scalability of data parallelism. This paper introduces a novel method to combine gradients called Adasum that significantly improves the convergence when using large minibatches. This paper provides the intuition and formal justification of Adasum along with a convergence proof. Additionally, the paper describes an efficient implementation of Adasum and its integration into the open-source toolkit Horovod for use in both TensorFlow and PyTorch. The paper empirically shows that Adasum improves convergence when using large minibatch sizes for multiple optimizers (Momentum-SGD, Adam, and LAMB). For BERT-Large training with a minibatch size of 64K, using both Adasum and LAMB training converges in 20% fewer epochs than with LAMB alone. This combination also allows BERT-Large training to scale to a 128K minibatch size. While one of the motivations for LAMB was the inability of the Adam optimizer to scale beyond a minibatch size of 16K, we show that Adasum helps Adam scale BERT-Large training to a 64K minibatch size. Our implementation of Adasum in Horovod has already been adopted in several production environments.

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The Conference on Machine Learning and Systems targets research at the intersection of machine learning and systems. The conference aims to elicit new connections amongst these fields, including identifying best practices and design principles for learning systems, as well as developing novel learning methods and theory tailored to practical machine learning workflows.

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