Accelerating deep neural network learning for speech recognition on a cluster of GPUs

Guojing Cong, Brian Kingsbury, Soumyadip Gosh, George Saon, Fan Zhou

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We train deep neural networks to solve the acoustic modeling problem for large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition. We employ distributed processing using a cluster of GPUs. On modern GPUs, the sequential implementation takes over a day to train, and efficient parallelization without losing accuracy is notoriously hard. We show that ASGD methods for parallelization are not efficient for this application. Even with 4 GPUs, the overhead is significant, and the accuracies achieved are poor. We adapt a P-learner K-step model averaging algorithm that with 4 GPUs achieves accuracies comparable to that achieved by the sequential implementation. We further introduce adaptive measures that make our parallel implementation scale to the full cluster of 20 GPUs. Ultimately our parallel implementation achieves better accuracies than the sequential implementation with a 6.1 times speedup.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of MLHPC 2017
Subtitle of host publicationMachine Learning in HPC Environments - Held in conjunction with SC 2017: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)9781450351379
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 12 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event2017 Machine Learning in HPC Environments, MLHPC 2017 - Denver, United States
Duration: Nov 12 2017Nov 17 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of MLHPC 2017: Machine Learning in HPC Environments - Held in conjunction with SC 2017: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

Conference

Conference2017 Machine Learning in HPC Environments, MLHPC 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period11/12/1711/17/17

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