English

Demystifying Parallel and Distributed Deep Learning: An In-Depth Concurrency Analysis

Machine Learning 2018-09-18 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are becoming an important tool in modern computing applications. Accelerating their training is a major challenge and techniques range from distributed algorithms to low-level circuit design. In this survey, we describe the problem from a theoretical perspective, followed by approaches for its parallelization. We present trends in DNN architectures and the resulting implications on parallelization strategies. We then review and model the different types of concurrency in DNNs: from the single operator, through parallelism in network inference and training, to distributed deep learning. We discuss asynchronous stochastic optimization, distributed system architectures, communication schemes, and neural architecture search. Based on those approaches, we extrapolate potential directions for parallelism in deep learning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.09941,
  title  = {Demystifying Parallel and Distributed Deep Learning: An In-Depth Concurrency Analysis},
  author = {Tal Ben-Nun and Torsten Hoefler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.09941},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:35:15.731Z