COMET: A Novel Memory-Efficient Deep Learning Training Framework by Using Error-Bounded Lossy Compression

作者：Sian Jin, Chengming Zhang, Xintong Jiang, Yunhe Feng, Hui Guan, Guanpeng Li, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Dingwen Tao · 发表于：arXiv (Cornell University) · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.48550/arxiv.2111.09562 · 被引用次数：3 · 研究领域：Advanced Neural Network Applications、Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning、Brain Tumor Detection and Classification

Training wide and deep neural networks (DNNs) require large amounts of storage resources such as memory because the intermediate activation data must be saved in the memory during forward propagation and then restored for backward propagation. However, state-of-the-art accelerators such as GPUs are only equipped with very limited memory capacities due to hardware design constraints, which significantly limits the maximum batch size and hence performance speedup when training large-scale DNNs. Traditional memory saving techniques either suffer from performance overhead or are constrained by limited interconnect bandwidth or specific interconnect technology. In this paper, we propose a novel memory-efficient CNN training framework (called COMET) that leverages error-bounded lossy compression to significantly reduce the memory requirement for training, to allow training larger models or to accelerate training. Different from the state-of-the-art solutions that adopt image-based lossy compressors (such as JPEG) to compress the activation data, our framework purposely adopts error-bounded lossy compression with a strict error-controlling mechanism. Specifically, we perform a theoretical analysis on the compression error propagation from the altered activation data to the gradients, and empirically investigate the impact of altered gradients over the training process. Based on these analyses, we optimize the error-bounded lossy compression and propose an adaptive error-bound contro...