Title: Synkhronos: a Multi-GPU Theano Extension for Data Parallelism,
Abstract: We present Synkhronos, an extension to Theano for multi-GPU computations
leveraging data parallelism. Our framework provides automated execution and
synchronization across devices, allowing users to continue to write serial
programs without risk of race conditions. The NVIDIA Collective Communication
Library is used for high-bandwidth inter-GPU communication. Further
enhancements to the Theano function interface include input slicing (with
aggregation) and input indexing, which perform common data-parallel computation
patterns efficiently. One example use case is synchronous SGD, which has
recently been shown to scale well for a growing set of deep learning problems.
When training ResNet-50, we achieve a near-linear speedup of 7.5x on an NVIDIA
DGX-1 using 8 GPUs, relative to Theano-only code running a single GPU in
isolation. Yet Synkhronos remains general to any data-parallel computation
programmable in Theano. By implementing parallelism at the level of individual
Theano functions, our framework uniquely addresses a niche between manual
multi-device programming and prescribed multi-GPU training routines.