Shrivastava, Anshumali2022-09-232022-09-232022-052022-04-21May 2022Yan, Minghao. "Distributed SLIDE: Enabling Training Large Neural Networks on Low Bandwidth and Simple CPU-Clusters via Model Parallelism and Sparsity." (2022) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113304">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113304</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113304More than 70% of cloud computing is paid for but sits idle. A large fraction of these idle compute are cheap CPUs with few cores that are not utilized during the less busy hours. This paper aims to enable those CPU cycles to train heavyweight AI models. Our goal is against mainstream frameworks, which focus on leveraging expensive specialized ultra-high bandwidth interconnect to address the communication bottleneck in distributed neural network training. This paper presents a distributed model-parallel training framework that enables training large neural networks on small CPU clusters with low Internet bandwidth. We build upon the adaptive sparse training framework introduced by the SLIDE algorithm. By carefully deploying sparsity over distributed nodes, we demonstrate several orders of magnitude faster model parallel training than Horovod, the main engine behind most commercial software. We show that with reduced communication, due to sparsity, we can train close to a billion parameter model on simple 4-16 core CPU nodes connected by basic low bandwidth interconnect. Moreover, the training time is at par with some of the best hardware accelerators.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.Deep LearningDistributed TrainingThesis2022-09-23