Benchmark for Tuning Accuracy and Efficiency

Overview

The benchmark includes our efforts in using Colossal-AI to train different tasks to achieve SOTA results. We are interested in both validataion accuracy and training speed, and prefer larger batch size to take advantage of more GPU devices. For example, we trained vision transformer with batch size 512 on CIFAR10 and 4096 on ImageNet1k, which are basically not used in existing works. Some of the results in the benchmark trained with 8x A100 are shown below.

Task	Model	Training Time	Top-1 Accuracy
CIFAR10	ViT-Lite-7/4	~ 16 min	~ 90.5%
ImageNet1k	ViT-S/16	~ 16.5 h	~ 74.5%

The train.py script in each task runs training with the specific configuration script in configs/ for different parallelisms. Supported parallelisms include data parallel only (ends with vanilla), 1D (ends with 1d), 2D (ends with 2d), 2.5D (ends with 2p5d), 3D (ends with 3d).

Each configuration scripts basically includes the following elements, taking ImageNet1k task as example:

TOTAL_BATCH_SIZE = 4096
LEARNING_RATE = 3e-3
WEIGHT_DECAY = 0.3

NUM_EPOCHS = 300
WARMUP_EPOCHS = 32

# data parallel only
TENSOR_PARALLEL_SIZE = 1    
TENSOR_PARALLEL_MODE = None

# parallelism setting
parallel = dict(
    pipeline=1,
    tensor=dict(mode=TENSOR_PARALLEL_MODE, size=TENSOR_PARALLEL_SIZE),
)

fp16 = dict(mode=AMP_TYPE.TORCH, ) # amp setting

gradient_accumulation = 2 # accumulate 2 steps for gradient update

BATCH_SIZE = TOTAL_BATCH_SIZE // gradient_accumulation # actual batch size for dataloader

clip_grad_norm = 1.0 # clip gradient with norm 1.0

Upper case elements are basically what train.py needs, and lower case elements are what Colossal-AI needs to initialize the training.

Usage

To start training, use the following command to run each worker:

$ DATA=/path/to/dataset python train.py --world_size=WORLD_SIZE \
                                        --rank=RANK \
                                        --local_rank=LOCAL_RANK \
                                        --host=MASTER_IP_ADDRESS \
                                        --port=MASTER_PORT \
                                        --config=CONFIG_FILE

It is also recommended to start training with torchrun as:

$ DATA=/path/to/dataset torchrun --nproc_per_node=NUM_GPUS_PER_NODE \
                                 --nnodes=NUM_NODES \
                                 --node_rank=NODE_RANK \
                                 --master_addr=MASTER_IP_ADDRESS \
                                 --master_port=MASTER_PORT \
                                 train.py --config=CONFIG_FILE