Distributing control of deep learning training delivers 10x performance improvement

My IBM Research AI team and I recently completed the first formal theoretical study of the convergence rate and communications complexity associated with a decentralized distributed approach in a deep learning training setting. The empirical evidence proves that in specific configurations, a decentralized approach can result in a 10x performance boost over a centralized approach without additional complexity. A paper describing our work has been accepted for oral presentation at the NIPS 2017 Conference, one of the 40 out of 3240 submissions selected for this. Supervised machine learning generally consists of two phases: 1) training (building a model) and 2) inference (making predictions with the model). The training phase involves finding optimal values for a model's parameters such that error on a set of training examples is minimized, and the model generalizes to new data.