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Revisiting Distributed Synchronous SGD

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arxiv 1604.00981 v3 pith:NJA4HSN7 submitted 2016-04-04 cs.LG cs.DCcs.NE

Revisiting Distributed Synchronous SGD

classification cs.LG cs.DCcs.NE
keywords approachsynchronousasynchronousdistributednoiseoptimizationtrainingworkers
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Distributed training of deep learning models on large-scale training data is typically conducted with asynchronous stochastic optimization to maximize the rate of updates, at the cost of additional noise introduced from asynchrony. In contrast, the synchronous approach is often thought to be impractical due to idle time wasted on waiting for straggling workers. We revisit these conventional beliefs in this paper, and examine the weaknesses of both approaches. We demonstrate that a third approach, synchronous optimization with backup workers, can avoid asynchronous noise while mitigating for the worst stragglers. Our approach is empirically validated and shown to converge faster and to better test accuracies.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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