platoon

Experimental multi-GPU mini-framework for Theano

It supports data-parallelism inside one compute node, not model-parallelism. For model-parallelism check Theano multiple GPUs tutorial.

This framework is still a prototype. It's interfaces is not polished and it is likely to undergo changes in the future.

The framework allows multiple data-parallel algorithms, but only EASGD is currently implemented.

There are working examples in the examples directory.

In Platoon, there are two main components : workers, and controllers. Workers do the bulk of the work (training, monitoring, ...). Controllers interact with multiple workers to coordinate their work, collect the results and decide how to act on them. To use Platoon, you will need to implement both your workers and your controller but Platoon provides helper classes to facilitate this.

The steps below describe what needs to be done to use Platoon for data-parallelism. The LSTM example in the folder 'example' was implemented following these steps and should be referred to for guidance.

Timing of the LSTM example on 2 k80

The timing is about efficiency of computation, not efficiency of training. So the parameter alpha is constant. The number of minibatch is fixed as the hyper-parameter. The sync is also fixed to be after 10 mini-batch of computation.

With 1 worker, Platoon does not give you any advantage. This is there just to show the overhead of the EASGD implementation. Normal is without this framework and with SGD, also there for overhead evaluation.

Normal | 1 GPU | 2 GPUs | 3 GPUs | 4 GPUs -------+-------+--------+--------+------- 870s | 912s | 477s | 329s | 254s 1.00x | 0.95x | 1.82x | 2.65x | 3.42x

Real usage consideration

The optimal (as in more efficient for learning) hyper-parameters values are dependant on the number of workers. At least, consider tuning the learning rate and the alpha parameter of EASGD.

How to change the alpha hyper-parameter isn't clear. An alpha of 0.5 for the LSTM example with 2 workers seem to have good training efficency for this model/dataset/hyper-parameter combination.

Using alpha = 1/N (with N being the number of workers) might be a reasonable guideline but the experiments performed with Platoon are insufficient to conclude anything.

In the EASGD paper it is shown that in some cases a larger number of workers can result in a better test error.

Implementing a controller

These steps describe how to implement the Python script that will launch your controller. In the included LSTM example, both of these steps are done in the file lstm_master.py

Define which commands your controller can receive and how it responds to them.

This is done by creating a new class that inherits from channel.Lieutenant and having it override the method 'handle_control()' which will be called whenever your controller receives a request from a worker.

Instantiate and launch your custom controller.

Create a script that will instantiate your custom controller. Once this is done, define the port on which the controller should listen by calling the function 'init_control'. Finally, call your controller's 'serve' method which will make him ready to receive requests from workers.

Implementing the workers

These steps describe how to start with a script that performs stand-alone training of a machine learning model and adapt it to serve as a worker in Platoon.

Add a new parameter to the script which will be used during execution to know whether the worker is the first one to be launched and should create the central parameters or not.
Before entering the main loop, the script must create an instance of the class channel.Soldier, providing it with the same port number as used to initialize the controller. It is not necessary to sub-class Soldier, you can instantiate it directly. This object will provide the necessary methods to handle communication with the controller.
After the model has been built and the parameters initialized, initialize the central parameters by calling the Soldier's init_shared_params() method. Every worker should call this method but only the first worker to be launched should provide the parameter cleanup=True, the other workers should pass False or provide no value for this parameter.
In the main loop, instead of deciding when to train and when to monitor performance, the worker should send control request to the controller to know what action it should take, according to the communication protocol established in the controller's 'handle_control()' method.
In the main loop, whenever the worker has performed 'N' (a hyper-parameter) iterations of training, it should synchronize it's parameters with the central parameters using it's Soldier's 'sync_params()' method.

Putting it all together