NASPipe: high performance and reproducible pipeline parallel supernet training via causal synchronous parallelism

Supernet training, a prevalent and important paradigm in Neural Architecture Search, embeds the whole DNN architecture search space into one monolithic supernet, iteratively activates a subset of the supernet (i.e., a subnet) for fitting each batch of data, and searches a high-quality subnet which meets specific requirements. Although training subnets in parallel on multiple GPUs is desirable for acceleration, there inherently exists a race hazard that concurrent subnets may access the same DNN layers. Existing systems support neither efficiently parallelizing subnets' training executions, nor resolving the race hazard deterministically, leading to unreproducible training procedures and potentiallly non-trivial accuracy loss.

We present NASPipe, the first high-performance and reproducible distributed supernet training system via causal synchronous parallel (CSP) pipeline scheduling abstraction: NASPipe partitions a supernet across GPUs and concurrently executes multiple generated sub-tasks (subnets) in a pipelined manner; meanwhile, it oversees the correlations between the subnets and deterministically resolves any causal dependency caused by subnets' layer sharing. To obtain high performance, NASPipe's CSP scheduler exploits the fact that the larger a supernet spans, the fewer dependencies manifest between chronologically close subnets; therefore, it aggressively schedules the subnets with larger chronological orders into execution, only if they are not causally dependent on unfinished