A Hierarchical, Bulk-Synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent Algorithm for Deep-Learning Applications on GPU Clusters

The training data and models are becoming increasingly large in many deep-learning applications. Large-scale distributed processing is employed to accelerate training. Increasing the number of learners in synchronous and asynchronous stochastic gradient descent presents challenges to convergence and communication performance. We present our hierarchical, bulk-synchronous stochastic gradient algorithm that effectively balances execution time and accuracy for training in deep-learning applications on GPU clusters. It achieves much better convergence and execution time at scale in comparison to asynchronous stochastic gradient descent implementations. When deployed on a cluster of 128 GPUs, our implementation achieves up to 56 times speedups over the sequential stochastic gradient descent with similar test accuracy for our target application.