User-transparent Distributed TensorFlow

Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have become the de facto choice for data analysis. Several DL implementations – primarily limited to a single compute node – such as Caffe, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch have become readily available. Distributed DL implementations capable of execution on large scale systems are becoming important to address the computational needs of large data produced by scientific simulations and experiments. Yet, the adoption of distributed DL implementations faces significant impediments: 1) most implementations require DL analysts to modify their code significantly – which is a showstopper, 2) several distributed DL implementations are geared towards cloud computing systems – which is inadequate for execution on massively parallel systems such as supercomputers. This work addresses each of these problems. We provide a distributed memory DL implementation by incorporating required changes in the TensorFlow runtime itself. This dramatically reduces the entry barrier for using a distributed TensorFlow implementation. We use Message Passing Interface (MPI) – which provides performance portability, especially since MPI specific changes are abstracted from users. Lastly – and arguably most importantly – we make our implementation available for broader use, under the umbrella of Machine Learning Toolkit for Extreme Scale (MaTEx) at http://hpc.pnl.gov/matex. We refer to our implementation as MaTEx-TensorFlow.