FiLayer: A Novel Fine-Grained Layer-Wise Parallelism Strategy for Deep Neural Networks

Data parallelism and model parallelism are regarded as two major parallelism strategies for deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the two methodologies achieve acceleration mainly by applying coarse-grained network-model-based parallelization. Neither methodology can fully tap into the potentials of the parallelism of network models and many-core systems (such as GPUs). In this work, we propose a novel fine-grained parallelism strategy based on layer-wise parallelization (named FiLayer), which includes inter-layer parallelism and intra-layer parallelism. The former allows several adjacent layers in a network model to be processed in a pipelined manner. The latter divides the operations in one layer into several parts and processes them in parallel. CUDA streams are applied to realize the above fine-grained parallelisms. FiLayer is implemented by extending Caffe. Several typical datasets are used for the performance evaluation. The experimental results indicate that FiLayer can help Caffe achieve speedups of \(1.58{\times }\)–\(2.19{\times }\).