“Exascale Deep Learning for Scientific Inverse Problems”, Nouamane Laanait, Joshua Romero, Junqi Yin, M. Todd Young, Sean Treichler, Vitalii Starchenko, Albina Borisevich, Alex Sergeev, Michael Matheson2019-09-24 (; backlinks; similar)⁠:

We introduce novel communication strategies in synchronous distributed Deep Learning consisting of decentralized gradient reduction orchestration and computational graph-aware grouping of gradient tensors.

These new techniques produce an optimal overlap between computation and communication and result in near-linear scaling (0.93) of distributed training up to 27,600 NVIDIA V100 GPUs on the Summit Supercomputer. We demonstrate our gradient reduction techniques in the context of training a Fully Convolutional Neural Network to approximate the solution of a long-standing scientific inverse problem in materials imaging.

The efficient distributed training on a dataset size of 0.5 PB, produces a model capable of an atomically-accurate reconstruction of materials, and in the process reaching a peak performance of 2.15(4) EFLOPS16.