alexnet distributed tensorflow performance
<p>Running Alexnet using distributed tensorflow does not scale in number of images/sec. I am using the alexnet model here <a href="https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/fb8cab3095a3b8e65dff056d5db1ec53ac5fe73f/tensorflow/models/image/alexnet/alexnet_benchmark.py" rel="nofollow">alexnet_benchmark.py</a> with a few modifications for distributed training on EC2 G2(NVIDIA GRID K520) instance and I see that it can process 5<strong>6 images/sec on a single GPU,single host</strong>, however running it <strong>without the distributed code can process 112 images/sec on a single GPU</strong>. This seems very odd, Can you please review what could be wrong in this code for running it distributed ? The parameter server is not run on GPU but workers are run using CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES prefix</p>

<pre><code>ps_hosts = FLAGS.ps_hosts.split(",")
worker_hosts = FLAGS.worker_hosts.split(",")

# Create a cluster from the parameter server and worker hosts.
cluster = tf.train.ClusterSpec({"ps": ps_hosts, "worker": worker_hosts})

# Create and start a server for the local task.
server = tf.train.Server(cluster,
                   job_name=FLAGS.job_name,
                   task_index=FLAGS.task_index)

if FLAGS.job_name == "ps":
    server.join()
elif FLAGS.job_name == "worker":

    gpu = FLAGS.task_index % 4

    # Assigns ops to the local worker by default.
    with tf.device(tf.train.replica_device_setter(
        #'/gpu:%d' % i
        worker_device="/job:worker/task:%d" % FLAGS.task_index,
        #worker_device='/gpu:%d' % gpu,
        cluster=cluster)):

        summary_op = tf.merge_all_summaries()

        y, x = get_graph()

        y_ = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, NUM_LABELS])

        cross_entropy = tf.reduce_mean( -tf.reduce_sum(y_ * tf.log(y), reduction_indices=[1]) )

        global_step = tf.Variable(0)

        gradient_descent_opt = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(LEARNING_RATE)

        num_workers = len(worker_hosts)
        sync_rep_opt = tf.train.SyncReplicasOptimizer(gradient_descent_opt, replicas_to_aggregate=num_workers,
                replica_id=FLAGS.task_index, total_num_replicas=num_workers)

        train_op = sync_rep_opt.minimize(cross_entropy, global_step=global_step)

        init_token_op = sync_rep_opt.get_init_tokens_op()
        chief_queue_runner = sync_rep_opt.get_chief_queue_runner()

        #saver = tf.train.Saver()
        summary_op = tf.merge_all_summaries()

        init_op = tf.initialize_all_variables()
        saver = tf.train.Saver()

    is_chief=(FLAGS.task_index == 0)

    # Create a "supervisor", which oversees the training process.
    sv = tf.train.Supervisor(is_chief=(FLAGS.task_index == 0),
                             #logdir="/tmp/train_logs",
                             init_op=init_op,
                             summary_op=summary_op,
                             saver=saver,
                             global_step=global_step)
                             #save_model_secs=600)

    # The supervisor takes care of session initialization, restoring from
    # a checkpoint, and closing when done or an error occurs.
    with sv.managed_session(server.target) as sess:

        if is_chief:
            sv.start_queue_runners(sess, [chief_queue_runner])
            sess.run(init_token_op)

        num_steps_burn_in = 1000
        total_duration = 0
        total_duration_squared = 0
        step = 0

        while step &lt;= 40000:

            print('Iteration %d' % step)
            sys.stdout.flush()
            batch_xs, batch_ys = get_data(BATCH_SIZE)
            train_feed = {x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys}

            start_time = time.time()

            _, step = sess.run([train_op, global_step], feed_dict=train_feed)

            duration = time.time() - start_time
            if step &gt; num_steps_burn_in:
                total_duration += duration
                total_duration_squared += duration * duration

                if not step % 1000:
                    iterations = step - num_steps_burn_in
                    images_processed = BATCH_SIZE * iterations
                    print('%s: step %d, images processed: %d, images per second: %.3f, time taken: %.2f' %
                            (datetime.now(), iterations, images_processed, images_processed/total_duration, total_duration))
                    sys.stdout.flush()
    sv.stop()
</code></pre>