Enabling Mixed Precision Training is the most effective strategy to optimize training performance on an NVIDIA DGX A100 cluster as model size increases. Mixed precision uses lower-precision data types (e.g., FP16) alongside FP32, reducing memory usage and leveraging Tensor Cores on A100 GPUs for faster computation without significant accuracy loss. This approach, detailed in NVIDIA's "Mixed Precision Training Guide," accelerates training by allowing larger models to fit in GPU memory and speeding up matrix operations, addressing slowdowns in distributed setups.
Data parallelism (B) distributes data but may not help if memory constraints slow computation. Decreasing nodes (C) reduces parallelism, worsening performance. Increasing batch size (D) can strain memory further, exacerbating slowdowns. NVIDIA's DGX A100 documentation highlights mixed precision as a key optimization for large models.