Accelerating PyTorch Transformers with Intel Sapphire Rapids - part 1

About a year ago, we showed you how to distribute the training of Hugging Face transformers on a cluster or third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs (aka Ice Lake). Recently, Intel has launched the fourth generation of Xeon CPUs, code-named Sapphire Rapids, with exciting new instructions that speed up operations commonly found in deep learning models. In this post, you will learn how to accelerate a PyTorch training job with a cluster of Sapphire Rapids servers running on AWS. We will use the Intel oneAPI Collective Communications Library (CCL) to distribute the job, and the Intel Extension for PyTorch (IPEX) library to automatically put the new CPU instructions to work. As both libraries are already integrated with the Hugging Face transformers library, we will be able to run our sample scripts out of the box without changing a line of code.