Apr 4, 2021
Deep learning implementations on CPUs (Central Processing Units) are gaining more traction. Enhanced AI capabilities on commodity x86 architectures are commercially appealing due to the reuse of existing hardware and virtualization ease. A notable work in this direction is the SLIDE system. SLIDE is a C++ implementation of a sparse hash table based back-propagation, which is significantly faster than the best available GPUs in training hundreds of million parameter neural models. In this paper, we argue that SLIDE's current implementation is sub-optimal and does not exploit several opportunities available in modern CPUs. In particular, we show how SLIDE's computations allow for a unique possibility of vectorization via AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions)-512. Furthermore, we highlight opportunities for different kinds of memory optimization and quantizations. Combining all of them, we obtain up to 7x speedup in the computations on the same hardware. When compared with GPUs, our Optimized SLIDE on modern Intel CPUs can provide anywhere from 4-15x faster training than the best TensorFlow implementation on V100. The experiments are focused on large (hundreds of millions of parameters) recommendation and NLP models. Our work highlights several novel perspectives and opportunities for implementing randomized algorithms for deep learning on modern CPUs.
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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