Faster Neural Network Training with Data Echoing (Paper Explained)

CPUs are often bottlenecks in Machine Learning pipelines. Data fetching, loading, preprocessing and augmentation can be slow to a point where the GPUs are mostly idle. Data Echoing is a technique to re-use data that is already in the pipeline to reclaim this idle time and keep the GPUs busy at all times.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05550

Abstract: In the twilight of Moore's law, GPUs and other specialized hardware accelerators have dramatically sped up neural network training. However, earlier stages of the training pipeline, such as disk I/O and data preprocessing, do not run on accelerators. As accelerators continue to improve, these earlier stages will increasingly become the bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce "data echoing," which reduces the total computation used by earlier pipeline stages and speeds up training whenever computation upstream from accelerators dominates the training time. Data echoing reuses (or "echoes") intermediate outputs from earlier pipeline stages in order to reclaim idle capacity. We investigate the behavior of different data echoing algorithms on various workloads, for various amounts of echoing, and for various batch sizes. We find that in all settings, at least one data echoing algorithm can match the baseline's predictive performance using less upstream computation. We measured a factor of 3.25 decrease in wall-clock time for ResNet-50 on ImageNet when reading training data over a network.

Authors: Dami Choi, Alexandre Passos, Christopher J. Shallue, George E. Dahl

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