NeurIPS 2022accept16 citations

SAPipe: Staleness-Aware Pipeline for Data Parallel DNN Training

Yangrui Chen, Cong Xie, Meng Ma, Juncheng Gu, Yanghua Peng, Haibin Lin, Chuan Wu, Yibo Zhu

Abstract

Data parallelism across multiple machines is widely adopted for accelerating distributed deep learning, but it is hard to achieve linear speedup due to the heavy communication. In this paper, we propose SAPipe, a performant system that pushes the training speed of data parallelism to its fullest extent. By introducing partial staleness, the communication overlaps the computation with minimal staleness in SAPipe. To mitigate additional problems incurred by staleness, SAPipe adopts staleness compensation techniques including weight prediction and delay compensation with provably lower error bounds. Additionally, SAPipe presents an algorithm-system co-design with runtime optimization to minimize system overhead for the staleness training pipeline and staleness compensation. We have implemented SAPipe in the BytePS framework, compatible to both TensorFlow and PyTorch. Our experiments show that SAPipe achieves up to 157% speedups over BytePS (non-stale), and outperforms PipeSGD in accuracy by up to 13.7%.

data parallelismcommunication optimizationstaleness mitigation
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
chen2022sapipe,
title={{SAP}ipe: Staleness-Aware Pipeline for Data Parallel {DNN} Training},
author={Yangrui Chen and Cong Xie and Meng Ma and Juncheng Gu and Yanghua Peng and Haibin Lin and Chuan Wu and Yibo Zhu},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
editor={Alice H. Oh and Alekh Agarwal and Danielle Belgrave and Kyunghyun Cho},
year={2022},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=3MZnNARib5}
}
SAPipe: Staleness-Aware Pipeline for Data Parallel DNN Training · NeurIPS 2022