The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the past decade, and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learn...