English

Checkmate: Breaking the Memory Wall with Optimal Tensor Rematerialization

Machine Learning 2020-05-15 v3 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Machine Learning

Abstract

We formalize the problem of trading-off DNN training time and memory requirements as the tensor rematerialization optimization problem, a generalization of prior checkpointing strategies. We introduce Checkmate, a system that solves for optimal rematerialization schedules in reasonable times (under an hour) using off-the-shelf MILP solvers or near-optimal schedules with an approximation algorithm, then uses these schedules to accelerate millions of training iterations. Our method scales to complex, realistic architectures and is hardware-aware through the use of accelerator-specific, profile-based cost models. In addition to reducing training cost, Checkmate enables real-world networks to be trained with up to 5.1x larger input sizes. Checkmate is an open-source project, available at https://github.com/parasj/checkmate.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.02653,
  title  = {Checkmate: Breaking the Memory Wall with Optimal Tensor Rematerialization},
  author = {Paras Jain and Ajay Jain and Aniruddha Nrusimha and Amir Gholami and Pieter Abbeel and Kurt Keutzer and Ion Stoica and Joseph E. Gonzalez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.02653},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

In Proceedings of 3rd Conference Machine Learning and Systems 2020 (MLSys 2020)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:36:03.730Z