AutoPipe-H: A Heterogeneity-Aware Data-Paralleled Pipeline Approach on Commodity GPU Servers

Recently, the data-parallel pipeline approach has been widely used in training DNN models on commodity GPU servers. However, there are still three challenges for hybrid parallelism on commodity GPU servers: i) a balanced model partition is crucial for efficiency, whereas prior works lack a sound solution to generate a balanced partition automatically; ii) an orchestrated device mapping is essential to reduce communication contention, however, prior works ignore server heterogeneity, exacerbating communication contention; iii) the startup overhead is inevitable and especially significant for deep pipelines, which is an essential source of pipeline bubbles and severely affects pipeline scalability. We propose AutoPipe-H to solve these three problems, which contains i) a pipeline partitioner component for automatically and quickly generating a balanced sub-block partition scheme; ii) a device mapping component that assigns pipeline stages to devices, considering server heterogeneity, to reduce communication contention; and iii) a distributed training runtime component that reduces pipeline startup overhead by splitting the micro-batch evenly. The experimental results show that AutoPipe-H can accelerate training by up to 1.26x over the hybrid parallelism framework DAPPLE and Piper, with a 2.73x-12.7x improvement in the partition balance and an order-of-magnitude time reduction in partition scheme searching.