Distributed Training and Inference of Deep Learning Models for Multi-Modal Land Cover Classification

Abstract

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have established themselves as a fundamental tool in numerous computational modeling applications, overcoming the challenge of defining use-case-specific feature extraction processing by incorporating this stage into unified end-to-end trainable models. Despite their capabilities in modeling, training large-scale DNN models is a very computation-intensive task that most single machines are often incapable of accomplishing. To address this issue, different parallelization schemes were proposed. Nevertheless, network overheads as well as optimal resource allocation pose as major challenges, since network communication is generally slower than intra-machine communication while some layers are more computationally expensive than others. In this work, we consider a novel multimodal DNN based on the Convolutional Neural Network architecture and explore several different ways to optimize its performance when training is executed on an Apache Spark Cluster. We evaluate the performance of different architectures via the metrics of network traffic and processing power, considering the case of land cover classification from remote sensing observations. Furthermore, we compare our architectures with an identical DNN architecture modeled after a data parallelization approach by using the metrics of classification accuracy and inference execution time. The experiments show that the way a model is parallelized has tremendous effect on resource allocation and hyperparameter tuning can reduce network overheads. Experimental results also demonstrate that proposed model parallelization schemes achieve more efficient resource use and more accurate predictions compared to data parallelization approaches.