Cyclic Data Parallelism for Efficient Parallelism of Deep Neural
  Networks
Louis Fournier Edouard Oyallon
Training large deep learning models requires parallelization techniques to
scale. In existing methods such as Data Parallelism or ZeRO-DP, micro-batches
of data are processed in parallel, which creates two drawbacks: the total
memory required to store the model's activations peaks at the end of the
forward pass, and gradients must be simultaneously averaged at the end of the
backpropagation step. We propose Cyclic Data Parallelism, a novel paradigm
shifting the execution of the micro-batches from simultaneous to sequential,
with a uniform delay. At the cost of a slight gradient delay, the total memory
taken by activations is constant, and the gradient communications are balanced
during the training step. With Model Parallelism, our technique reduces the
number of GPUs needed, by sharing GPUs across micro-batches. Within the ZeRO-DP
framework, our technique allows communication of the model states with
point-to-point operations rather than a collective broadcast operation. We
illustrate the strength of our approach on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets.