BlueFog: Make Decentralized Algorithms Practical for Optimization and Deep Learning
This provides an easy-to-use and efficient tool for researchers and practitioners working on large-scale distributed optimization and deep learning, though it is incremental as it builds on existing decentralized algorithm concepts.
The authors tackled the lack of practical software for decentralized algorithms in optimization and deep learning by introducing BlueFog, a Python library that achieved a 1.2x to 1.8x speedup over Horovod on DNN training tasks.
Decentralized algorithm is a form of computation that achieves a global goal through local dynamics that relies on low-cost communication between directly-connected agents. On large-scale optimization tasks involving distributed datasets, decentralized algorithms have shown strong, sometimes superior, performance over distributed algorithms with a central node. Recently, developing decentralized algorithms for deep learning has attracted great attention. They are considered as low-communication-overhead alternatives to those using a parameter server or the Ring-Allreduce protocol. However, the lack of an easy-to-use and efficient software package has kept most decentralized algorithms merely on paper. To fill the gap, we introduce BlueFog, a python library for straightforward, high-performance implementations of diverse decentralized algorithms. Based on a unified abstraction of various communication operations, BlueFog offers intuitive interfaces to implement a spectrum of decentralized algorithms, from those using a static, undirected graph for synchronous operations to those using dynamic and directed graphs for asynchronous operations. BlueFog also adopts several system-level acceleration techniques to further optimize the performance on the deep learning tasks. On mainstream DNN training tasks, BlueFog reaches a much higher throughput and achieves an overall $1.2\times \sim 1.8\times$ speedup over Horovod, a state-of-the-art distributed deep learning package based on Ring-Allreduce. BlueFog is open source at https://github.com/Bluefog-Lib/bluefog.