Accelerating PyTorch Transformers with Intel Sapphire Rapids - part 1

This post details the process of accelerating PyTorch Transformers training on Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs using AWS EC2 R7iz instances. It covers setting up a distributed training cluster with Intel oneAPI Collective Communications Library (CCL) and Intel Extension for PyTorch (IPEX), leveraging new CPU instructions like AMX (BF16 and INT8) for accelerated matrix multiplication. The post provides a step-by-step guide for building the cluster, configuring the master node, and launching a distributed training job for question answering on the SQUAD dataset, demonstrating significant speedups compared to previous generations of Intel CPUs.