Skip to main content

Pytorch

Training

Training is the phase of machine learning where model parameters are adjusted to minimize a loss on a dataset. For deep learning, that means repeated forward passes (compute predictions), backward passes (propagate gradients via autodiff), and optimizer steps (update weights)—from scratch pretraining, continued pretraining, or fine-tuning (full, LoRA, or other parameter-efficient methods). The objective is model quality (accuracy, perplexity, task metrics) within a compute and time budget, not millisecond response to end users. Training jobs are batch-oriented: large minibatches, epochs over terabytes of tokens or images, checkpointing to durable storage, and experiment tracking. LLM training at scale uses distributed strategies—data parallel, tensor parallel, pipeline parallel, and expert parallel for MoE—coordinated by frameworks such as PyTorch with FSDP or DeepSpeed.

ROCm (Radeon Open Compute)

ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) is AMD’s software stack for GPU compute on datacenter Instinct accelerators (and select consumer GPUs in community setups). Its objective mirrors CUDA for NVIDIA: provide kernel compilers (HIP), math libraries (rocBLAS, rocFFT), collective communication (RCCL, analogous to NCCL), and framework integrations so PyTorch and inference runtimes can execute training and inference on AMD hardware. ROCm is positioned as an open platform (Linux-first) for customers who want accelerator choice or who standardize on AMD in HPC and AI clusters.