Gradient Compression Supercharged High-Performance Data Parallel DNN Training

Gradient compression is a promising approach to alleviating the communication bottleneck in data parallel deep neural network (DNN) training by significantly reducing the data volume of gradients for synchronization. While gradient compression is being actively adopted by the industry (e.g., Facebook and AWS), our study reveals that there are two critical but often overlooked challenges: 1) inefficient coordination between compression and communication during gradient synchronization incurs substantial overheads, and 2) developing, optimizing, and integrating gradient compression algorithms into DNN systems imposes heavy burdens on DNN practitioners, and ad-hoc compression implementations often yield surprisingly poor system performance. In this paper, we first propose a compression-aware gradient synchronization architecture, CaSync, which relies on a flexible composition of basic computing and communication primitives. It is general and compatible with any gradient compression algorithms and gradient synchronization strategies, and enables high-performance computation-communication pipelining. We further introduce a gradient compression toolkit, CompLL, to enable efficient development and automated integration of on-GPU compression algorithms into DNN systems with little programming burden. Lastly, we build a compression-aware DNN training framework HiPress with CaSync and CompLL. HiPress is open-sourced and runs on mainstream DNN systems such as MXNet, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. Evaluation via a 16-node cluster with 128 NVIDIA V100 GPUs and 100Gbps network shows that HiPress improves the training speed over current compression-enabled systems (e.g., BytePS-onebit and Ring-DGC) by 17.2%-69.5% across six popular DNN models.