Multi-node Training for StyleGAN2

Abstract

StyleGAN2 is a Tensorflow-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework that represents the state-of-the-art in generative image modelling. The current release of StyleGAN2 implements multi-GPU training via Tensorflow’s device contexts which limits data parallelism to a single node. In this work, a data-parallel multi-node training capability is implemented in StyleGAN2 via Horovod which enables harnessing the compute capability of larger cluster architectures. We demonstrate that the new Horovod-based communication outperforms the previous context approach on a single node. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the multi-node training does not compromise the accuracy of StyleGAN2 for a constant effective batch size. Finally, we report strong and weak scaling of the new implementation up to 64 NVIDIA Tesla A100 GPUs distributed across eight NVIDIA DGX A100 nodes, demonstrating the utility of the approach at scale.