OF-WFBP: A near-optimal communication mechanism for tensor fusion in distributed deep learning

The communication bottleneck has severely restricted the scalability of distributed deep learning. Tensor fusion improves the scalability of data parallelism by overlapping computation and communication tasks. However, existing tensor fusion schemes only result in suboptimal training performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient communication mechanism (OF-WFBP) to find the optimal tensor fusion scheme for synchronous data parallelism. We present the mathematical model of OF-WFBP and prove it is an NP-hard problem. We mathematically solve the mathematical model of OF-WFBP in two cases. We propose an improved sparrow search algorithm (GradSSA) to find the near-optimal tensor fusion scheme efficiently in other cases. Experimental results on two different GPU clusters show that OF-WFBP achieves up to 1.43x speedup compared to the state-of-the-art tensor fusion mechanisms.