Accelerating distributed deep neural network training with pipelined MPI allreduce

TensorFlow (TF) is usually combined with the Horovod (HVD) workload distribution package to obtain a parallel tool to train deep neural network on clusters of computers. HVD in turn utilizes a blocking Allreduce primitive to share information among processes, combined with a communication thread to overlap communication with computation. In this work, we perform a thorough experimental analysis to expose (1) the importance of selecting the best algorithm in MPI libraries to realize the Allreduce operation; and (2) the performance acceleration that can be attained when replacing a blocking Allreduce with its non-blocking counterpart (while maintaining the blocking behaviour via the appropriate synchronization mechanism). Furthermore, (3) we explore the benefits of applying pipelining to the communication exchange, demonstrating that these improvements carry over to distributed training via TF+HVD. Finally, (4) we show that pipelining can also boost performance for applications that make heavy use of other collectives, such as Broadcast and Reduce-Scatter.