Large Scale Machine Learning with Python

Appendix A. Introduction to GPUs and Theano

Up until now we performed neural networks and deep learning tasks utilizing regular CPU's. Lately however, computational advantages of GPU's become widespread. This chapter dives in to the basics of GPU together with the Theano framework for deep learning.

GPU computing

When we use regular CPU computing packages for machine learning, such as Scikit-learn, the amount of parallelization is surprisingly limited because, by default, an algorithm utilizes only one core even when there are multiple cores available. In the chapter about Classification and Regression Trees (CART), we will see some advanced examples of speeding up Scikit-learn algorithms.

Unlike CPU, GPU units are designed to work in parallel from ...