EL-Rec: Efficient Large-Scale Recommendation Model Training via Tensor-Train Embedding Table
Zheng Wang, Yuke Wang, Boyuan Feng, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Bharath Muthiah, Yufei Ding
Abstract
Deep learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) plays an important role in various application domains. However, existing DLRM training systems require a large number of GPUs due to the memory-intensive embedding tables. To this end, we propose EL-Rec, an efficient computing framework harnessing the Tensor-train (TT) technique to democratize the training of large-scale DLRMs with limited GPU resources. Specifically, EL-Rec optimizes TT decomposition based on key computation primitives of embedding tables and implements a high-performance compressed embedding table which is a drop-in replacement of Pytorch API. EL-Rec introduces an index reordering technique to harvest the performance gains from both local and global information of training inputs. EL-Rec also highlights a pipeline training paradigm to eliminate the communication overhead between the host memory and the training worker. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that EL-Rec can handle the largest publicly available DLRM dataset with a single GPU and achieves 3× speedup over the state-of-the-art DLRM frameworks.