Accelerated Training with HugeCTR

A real-world production model serves hundreds of millions of users, which contains embedding tables with up to 100GB to 1TB in size. Training deep learning recommender system models with such large embedding tables can be challenging as they do not fit into the memory of a single GPU.

To combat that challenge, we developed HugeCTR, which is an open-source deep learning framework that is a highly optimized library written in CUDA C++, specifically for recommender systems. It supports an optimized dataloader and is able to scale embedding tables using multiple GPUs and nodes. As a result, there is no embedding table size limitation. HugeCTR also offers the following:

• Model oversubscription for training embedding tables with single nodes that don’t fit within the GPU or CPU memory (only required embeddings are prefetched from a parameter server per batch).

• Asynchronous and multithreaded data pipelines.

• A highly optimized data loader.

• Implementation of common architectures such as Wide&Deep and DLRM.

• Support for data formats such as parquet and binary.

• Easy configuration using JSON or the Python API.

When training is accelerated with HugeCTR, the following happens:

1. The required libraries are imported in which the HugeCTR lib directory is specified as follows:

   import sys
   sys.path.append("/usr/local/hugectr/lib")
   from hugectr import Session, solver_parser_helper, get_learning_rate_scheduler
   

2. The JSON configuration file is specified, which defines the model architecture.

   # Set config file
   json_file = "dlrm_fp32_64k.json"
   

   The JSON file defines the input layers as follows:

   • slot_size_array is the cardinality of categorical input features

   • source is a text file that contains filenames for training

   • eval_source is a text file that contains filenames for evaluation

   • label-label_dim provides the number of target columns

   • dense-label_dim provides the number of continuous input features

   • sparse-label_dim provides the number of categorical input features

   # Part of JSON config
   "layers": [
     {
     "name": "data",
     "type": "Data",
     "format": "Parquet",
     "slot_size_array": [10000000, 10000000, 3014529, 400781, 11, 2209, 11869, 148, 4, 977, 15, 38713, 10000000, 10000000, 10000000, 584616, 12883, 109, 37, 17177, 7425,             20266, 4, 7085, 1535, 64],
     "source": "/raid/criteo/tests/test_dask/output/train/_file_list.txt",
     "eval_source": "/raid/criteo/tests/test_dask/output/valid/_file_list.txt",
     "check": "None",
     "label": {
         "top": "label",
         "label_dim": 1
     },
     "dense": {
         "top": "dense",
         "dense_dim": 13
     },
     "sparse": [
         {
         "top": "data1",
         "type": "LocalizedSlot",
         "max_feature_num_per_sample": 30,
         "max_nnz": 1,
         "slot_num": 26
         }
     ]
   },
   

3. The solver configuration is defined. The batch_sizes for training, validation, and GPUs are specified in the solver configuration.

   # Set solver config
   solver_config = solver_parser_helper(seed = 0,
                                        batchsize = 16384,
                                        batchsize_eval = 16384,
                                        vvgpu = [[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7]],
                                        repeat_dataset = True
   
   )
   

4. The learning rate schedule in the JSON file and HugeCTR session is initialized.

   # Set learning rate
   lr_sch = get_learning_rate_scheduler(json_file)
   # Train model
   sess = Session(solver_config, json_file)
   sess.start_data_reading()
   

5. The dataset is iterated for 5000 steps and the model is trained.

   for i in range(5000):
      lr = lr_sch.get_next()
      sess.set_learning_rate(lr)
      sess.train()
      if (i%100 == 0):
        loss = sess.get_current_loss()
        print("[HUGECTR][INFO] iter: {}; loss: {}".format(i, loss))
      if (i%3000 == 0 and i != 0):
        metrics = sess.evaluation()
        print("[HUGECTR][INFO] iter: {}, {}".format(i, metrics))
   

For more information, refer to the HugeCTR documentation or the HugeCTR repository on GitHub.