Optimization of GPU and CPU acceleration for neural networks layers implemented in python

Abstract

Many neural architectures including RBF, SVM, FSVC classifiers, or deep-learning solutions require the efficient implementation of neurons layers, each of them having a given number of m neurons, a specific set of parameters and operating on a training or test set of N feature vectors having each a dimension n. Herein we investigate how to allocate the computation on GPU kernels and how to better optimize the problem parameters (neural structure and training set size) as well as the GPU parameters in order to maximize the acceleration (relative to a CPU implementation). It is shown that by maximizing the load (number of threads on each computational GPU core) and by a proper allocation of the GPU global memory, very large speedups (100–250 times) with respect to the CPU implementation can be achieved while using the convenient NUMBA Python package supporting CUDA programming of GPU. Consequently, it is shown that given a problem to be posed to a neural network a convenient decomposition of the network can be done in order to allocate optimally the parts of the computation to the GPU in order to maximize efficiency. Also, for CPU implementations it was found that Intel's MKL library (called from NUMPY package) can offer efficient implementation of neural layers, comparable to what is achieved using GPU.