  Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have become the de facto Machine Learning (ML)
algorithm for large scale data analysis. DL algorithms are computationally
expensive - even distributed DL implementations which use MPI require days of
training (model learning) time on commonly studied datasets. Long running DL
applications become susceptible to faults - requiring development of a fault
tolerant system infrastructure, in addition to fault tolerant DL algorithms.
This raises an important question: What is needed from MPI for de- signing
fault tolerant DL implementations? In this paper, we address this problem for
permanent faults. We motivate the need for a fault tolerant MPI specification
by an in-depth consideration of recent innovations in DL algorithms and their
properties, which drive the need for specific fault tolerance features. We
present an in-depth discussion on the suitability of different parallelism
types (model, data and hybrid); a need (or lack thereof) for check-pointing of
any critical data structures; and most importantly, consideration for several
fault tolerance proposals (user-level fault mitigation (ULFM), Reinit) in MPI
and their applicability to fault tolerant DL implementations. We leverage a
distributed memory implementation of Caffe, currently available under the
Machine Learning Toolkit for Extreme Scale (MaTEx). We implement our approaches
by ex- tending MaTEx-Caffe for using ULFM-based implementation. Our evaluation
using the ImageNet dataset and AlexNet, and GoogLeNet neural network topologies
demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed fault tolerant DL implementation
using OpenMPI based ULFM.
