4 ms·

> Batching saves more time, and gets better results, than clock speed. How much time is saved? If you've got a 12GB card at 5x speed vs. a 96GB card at 1x spe

> Batching saves more time, and gets better results, than clock speed. How much time is saved? If you've got a 12GB card at 5x speed vs. a 96GB card at 1x speed (so 5x slower), is the former still competitive? How much faster does the 12GB card need to be to get the same quality results with less memory (and smaller batches)? What if the faster card has 24GB of memory?

atylerrice 4y ago
Well the batch size also helps with making training more stable. So a larger batch size computes the gradient across more examples so it ends up being more stable than only using a batch size of day one. A batch size of one is only fixing the error on one example rather than many. a larger Batch size can help keep the gpu fed but usually that’s not a problem with these larger models.
godelski 4y ago
Hard to say tbh. Could be infinite, could be zero. In classification batch is going to help a ton (including stability) and you may not even get top results without a high batch, so infinite in that case. More realistically, consider that batch also helps with GPU I/O. I/O slows things down quite a lot, so if you're moving stuff in and out of the accelerator a lot then you can easily be I/O bound. For generation the conversation gets more complicated. For GANs the smaller card could do better if you can fit a proper batch size there (probably not tbh but often closer to 16 or 24 so that may be better here). Here distributed tends to help more. For VAEs, Diffusion, Autoregressive, etc are more stable and can also hugely benefit from large batches. So the truth is an unsatisfying "it depends." I know that may not be the answer you're looking for, but it is the real one. It takes a lot of work and tricks to scale (as anyone working in non-ML HPC will tell you very similar stories about scaling). But also note that the clock speeds aren't as big of a gap as you note though the memory gaps are.

atylerrice 4y ago

Well the batch size also helps with making training more stable. So a larger batch size computes the gradient across more examples so it ends up being more stable than only using a batch size of day one. A batch size of one is only fixing the error on one example rather than many. a larger Batch size can help keep the gpu fed but usually that’s not a problem with these larger models.

godelski 4y ago

Hard to say tbh. Could be infinite, could be zero. In classification batch is going to help a ton (including stability) and you may not even get top results without a high batch, so infinite in that case. More realistically, consider that batch also helps with GPU I/O. I/O slows things down quite a lot, so if you're moving stuff in and out of the accelerator a lot then you can easily be I/O bound. For generation the conversation gets more complicated. For GANs the smaller card could do better if you can fit a proper batch size there (probably not tbh but often closer to 16 or 24 so that may be better here). Here distributed tends to help more. For VAEs, Diffusion, Autoregressive, etc are more stable and can also hugely benefit from large batches. So the truth is an unsatisfying "it depends." I know that may not be the answer you're looking for, but it is the real one. It takes a lot of work and tricks to scale (as anyone working in non-ML HPC will tell you very similar stories about scaling). But also note that the clock speeds aren't as big of a gap as you note though the memory gaps are.