Accelerators¶

Accelerators connect a Lightning Trainer to arbitrary accelerators (CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, etc). Accelerators also manage distributed communication through Plugins (like DP, DDP, HPC cluster) and can also be configured to run on arbitrary clusters or to link up to arbitrary computational strategies like 16-bit precision via AMP and Apex.

An Accelerator is meant to deal with one type of hardware. Currently there are accelerators for:

CPU
GPU
TPU
IPU

Each Accelerator gets two plugins upon initialization: One to handle differences from the training routine and one to handle different precisions.

from pytorch_lightning import Trainer
from pytorch_lightning.accelerators import GPUAccelerator
from pytorch_lightning.plugins import NativeMixedPrecisionPlugin, DDPPlugin

accelerator = GPUAccelerator(
    precision_plugin=NativeMixedPrecisionPlugin(16, "cuda"),
    training_type_plugin=DDPPlugin(),
)
trainer = Trainer(accelerator=accelerator)

We expose Accelerators and Plugins mainly for expert users who want to extend Lightning to work with new hardware and distributed training or clusters.

Warning

The Accelerator API is in beta and subject to change. For help setting up custom plugins/accelerators, please reach out to us at support@pytorchlightning.ai

Accelerator API¶

`Accelerator`	The Accelerator Base Class.
`CPUAccelerator`	Accelerator for CPU devices.
`GPUAccelerator`	Accelerator for GPU devices.
`TPUAccelerator`	Accelerator for TPU devices.
`IPUAccelerator`	Accelerator for IPUs.