Title
ScaleCom: Scalable Sparsified Gradient Compression for Communication-Efficient Distributed Training
Abstract
Large-scale distributed training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on state-of-the-art platforms is expected to be severely communication constrained. To overcome this limitation, numerous gradient compression techniques have been proposed and have demonstrated high compression ratios. However, most existing methods do not scale well to large scale distributed systems (due to gradient build-up) and/or fail to evaluate model fidelity (test accuracy) on large datasets. To mitigate these issues, we propose a new compression technique, Scalable Sparsified Gradient Compression (ScaleCom), that leverages similarity in the gradient distribution amongst learners to provide significantly improved scalability. Using theoretical analysis, we show that ScaleCom provides favorable convergence guarantees and is compatible with gradient all-reduce techniques. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate that ScaleCom has small overheads, directly reduces gradient traffic and provides high compression rates (65-400X) and excellent scalability (up to 64 learners and 8-12X larger batch sizes over standard training) across a wide range of applications (image, language, and speech) without significant accuracy loss.
Year
Venue
DocType
2020
NIPS 2020
Conference
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
33
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chia-Yu Chen1284.64
Jiamin Ni200.68
Songtao Lu38419.52
Xiaodong Cui441040.82
Pin-Yu Chen564674.59
Sun, Xiao671.83
Naigang Wang7507.37
Swagath Venkataramani863139.33
Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan9815.08
Wei Zhang1034519.04
Kailash Gopalakrishnan1136129.76