4.6 Speeding Up Model Training Using GPUs

What we covered in this video lecture

In this lecture, we learned how to transfer tensors from the CPU to GPU memory to train neural networks more efficiently — GPUs are especially great for linear algebra operations that can be parallelized, for example, dot products and matrix multiplication.

If you have any questions or need tips or help with your PyTorch GPU setup, please don’t hesitate to reach out via the Discussion Forum.

Also, please note that this was just a short introduction to using GPUs in PyTorch. We will revisit this topic many times in this course. For instance, GPUs will become more relevant in Unit 7, where we work with computer vision models. Also, GPUs are essential for modern large language models, which we will cover in Unit 8. Finally, how do we train neural networks using not one but multiple GPUs? That’s a topic we will talk about in Unit 9!

Additional resources if you want to learn more

If you don’t have a suitable GPU in your computer, you can consider cloud resources. For example, as of this writing, if you have a Lightning account, you get $30 worth of GPU credits for free when you sign up. You could then use the SO-AND-SO App to train a model on a GPU. (NOTE to Olya: need to fill this in based on a response here: https://lightning-ai-corp.slack.com/archives/C047613N6Q6/p1673638728969079) Alternative resources include Google Colab and Kaggle Notebooks.

If you are interested in further information why GPUs are so efficient for deep learning, and if you are perhaps interested in purchasing your own GPU instead of using cloud resources, check out this excellent Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning: My Experience and Advice for Using GPUs in Deep Learning guide.