Train large models in GPUs

1

I want to train VGG and ResNet from scratch. These models are too big to fit in a single GPU. Always get CUDA out of memory for batches sizes of 128 or 256. Is there any way I could train these models? Should I use multiple GPUs to train with each GPU processing small batch size?

Thanks in advance for any solutions.

2

If you have multiple GPUs, you could use e.g. DistributedDataParallel to chunk the batch so that each model (and device) will process a smaller batch size.

Alternatively, you could lower your batch size or use torch.utils.checkpoint to trade compute for memory.

3

  • [Recommend] For PyTorch >= 0.4, you can use torch.utils.checkpoint. It will compute the model piece by piece.

  • [Impaired performance] You can also lower your batch size, multiple forward, one backward. If you use multiple GPUs, maybe NVIDIA Apex SyncBatchNorm could help you to correcte the bad consequences.

  • [Impaired performance] Training a mixed precision model is also a way to solve your problem.

4

@ptrblck, @Eta_C can you elaborate mode on checkpoint and if you have an example how to code it ?

Thanks.

5

Here is a notebook showing an example usage (which is quite old by now, but should still show the proper usage of it). :wink:

1 Like