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add sparse update section in fluid dist doc #8997

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11 changes: 7 additions & 4 deletions doc/design/fluid_dist/parameter_server.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -61,10 +61,13 @@ After converting:

### Sparse Update

For an embedding layer, the gradient may have many rows containing only 0 for each mini-batch.
Fluid use [SelectedRows](../selected_rows.md) to support sparse variables. Distributed training support `Sparse Update`,
which sends a `SelectedRows` variable to the parameter server to run parameter updates.
It would save a lot of bandwidth and make the distributed training job have better performance.
For embedding layers, the gradient may have many rows containing only 0 when training,
if the gradient use a dense tensor to do parameter optimization,
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use -> uses.

it could spend unnessesary memory, slow down the calculations and waste
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unnessesary => unnecessary

the bandwidth while doing distributed training.
In Fluid, we introduce [SelectedRows](../selected_rows.md) to represent a list of rows containing
non-zero gradient data. So when we do parameter optimization both locally and remotely,
we only need to send those non-zero rows to the optimizer operators:

<img src="src/sparse_update.png" width="700" />

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