Qsparse-Local-SGD: Distributed SGD With Quantization, Sparsification, and Local Computations
Communication bottleneck has been identified as a significant issue in distributed optimization of large-scale learning models. Recently, several approaches to mitigate this problem have been proposed, including different forms of gradient compression or computing local models and mixing them iteratively. In this paper, we propose Qsparse-local-SGD algorithm, which combines aggressive sparsification with quantization and local computation along with error compensation, by keeping track of the difference between the true and compressed gradients.