How to run Scikit's gp_minimize in parallel? - python

I am unable to make skopt.gp_minimize run at multiple cores. According to the documentation, the parameter n_jobs should set the number of cores. However, setting n_cores>1 seems to have no effect. Here is a minimal example that reproduces the problem:
from skopt import gp_minimize
import time
import datetime
def J(paramlist):
x = paramlist[0]
time.sleep(5)
return x**2
print "starting at "+str(datetime.datetime.now())
res = gp_minimize(J, # the function to minimize
[(-1.0, 1.0)],
acq_func="EI", # the acquisition function
n_calls=10, # the number of evaluations of f
n_random_starts=1, # the number of random initialization points
random_state=1234,
acq_optimizer="lbfgs",
n_jobs=5,
)
print "ending at "+str(datetime.datetime.now())
I am trying to optimize J. In order to verify if calls to J happen in parallel, I put a delay in J. The optimizer is set up for 10 function calls so I'd expect it to run for ~50 seconds in series and ~10 seconds if executed on 5 cores as specified.
The output is:
starting at 2022-11-28 12:32:30.954389
ending at 2022-11-28 12:33:23.403255
meaning that the runtime was 53 seconds and it did not run in parallel. I was wondering whether I'm missing something in the optimizer. I use Anaconda with the following scikit versions:
conda list | grep scikit
scikit-learn 0.19.2 py27_blas_openblasha84fab4_201 [blas_openblas] conda-forge
scikit-optimize 0.3 py27_0 conda-forge

Related

tensorflow distribute integers according to probabilities

I would like to distribute an integer for example 20, into four parts following the probability for each part:p=[0.02,0.5,0.3,0.18]
The corresponding python code is:
frequency=np.random.choice([1,2,3,4],20,p=[0.02,0.5,0.3,0.18])
from collections import Counter
np.fromiter(Counter(frequency).values(), dtype=np.float32)
# Out[86]:
# array([8., 8., 4.], dtype=float32)
However, I have over 1e8~ many parts and the number is not 20 but some 1e10.
So python is really slow.
for example
frequency=np.random.choice([i for i in range (10**7)],16**10,p=[0.0000001 for i in range(10**7)])
from collections import Counter
r=np.fromiter(Counter(frequency).values(), dtype=np.float32)
Now it simply yields MemoryError:
I think tensorflow gpu is able to conquer this issue, since the output result is only of size 10**7.
Does anyone know how to do this?
There are a few issues here to think of.
If you run the code on a GPU, it will never work because GPUs are not made for storage but rather fast computation so the space on the GPU is less than a CPU. However, this code may produce a memory error on a CPU too, as it did on my machine. So we first try to overcome that.
Overcoming the MemoryError on CPU:
The line producing the MemoryError is line 1 itself:
In [1]: frequency = np.random.choice([i for i in range (10**7)],16**10,p=[0.0000
...: 001 for i in range(10**7)])
...:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
MemoryError Traceback (most recent call last)
The reason for this is that the output of line 1 is not of size 10**7 but 16**10. Since this is what is causing the MemoryError, the goal should be never to create a list of that size.
To do this, we reduce the size of the sample by a factor and loop over the block factor number of times so that it is storable. On my machine, a factor of 1000000 does the trick. Once we have created the sample, we use Counter to turn it into a dictionary of frequencies. The advantage is that we know that the dictionary of frequencies, when converted to a list or numpy array, will never exceed the size of 10**7, which does not give a memory error.
As some of the elements might not be in the sampled array each time, instead of converting the Counter dictionary into a list directly, we will update this dictionary using the dictionary in the previous iteration to preserve frequencies of the specific elements.
Once the whole loop is done, we convert the created dictionary to a list. I have added a progressbar so as to track the progress since the computation might take a lot of time. Also, you don't need to add the parameter p to the np.random.choice() function in your specific case as the distribution is uniform anyway.
import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf
from click import progressbar
from collections import Counter
def large_uniform_sample_frequencies(factor=1000000, total_elements=10**7, sample_size=16**10):
# Initialising progressbar
bar = range(factor)
# Initialise an empty dictionary which
# will be updated in each iteration
counter_dict = {}
for iteration in bar:
# Generate a random sample of size (16 ** 10) / factor
frequency = np.random.choice([i for i in range (total_elements)],
sample_size / factor)
# Update the frequency dictionary
new_counter = Counter(frequency)
counter_dict.update(new_counter)
return np.fromiter(counter_dict.values(), dtype=np.float32)
Using tensorflow-gpu:
As you have mentioned tensorflow-gpu I can assume you either want to get rid of the MemoryError using tensorflow-gpu or run this in conjunction with tensorflow-gpu while using a GPU.
To solve the MemoryError, you may try the tf.multinomial() function to the same effect as np.random.choice() as shown here, but it is unlikely that it will help overcome the problem, which is storing data of a certain size and not performing some alternate computation.
If you want to run this as part of training some model for instance, you can use Distributed Tensorflow to place this part of the computation graph on the CPU as a PS Task by using the code given above. Here is the final code for that:
# Mention the devices for PS and worker tasks
ps_dev = '/cpu:0'
worker_dev = '/gpu:0'
# Toggle True to place computation on CPU
# and False to place it on the least loaded GPU
is_ps_task = True
# Set device for a PS task
if (is_ps_task):
device_setter = tf.train.replica_device_setter(worker_device=worker_dev,
ps_device=ps_dev,
ps_tasks=1)
# Allocate the computation to CPU
with tf.device(device_setter):
freqs = large_uniform_sample_frequencies()

How does one train multiple models in a single script in TensorFlow when there are GPUs present?

Say I have access to a number of GPUs in a single machine (for the sake of argument assume 8GPUs each with max memory of 8GB each in one single machine with some amount of RAM and disk). I wanted to run in one single script and in one single machine a program that evaluates multiple models (say 50 or 200) in TensorFlow, each with a different hyper parameter setting (say, step-size, decay rate, batch size, epochs/iterations, etc). At the end of training assume we just record its accuracy and get rid of the model (if you want assume the model is being check pointed every so often, so its fine to just throw away the model and start training from scratch. You may also assume some other data may be recorded like the specific hyper params, train, validation, train errors are recorded as we train etc).
Currently I have a (pseudo-)script that looks as follow:
def train_multiple_modles_in_one_script_with_gpu(arg):
'''
trains multiple NN models in one session using GPUs correctly.
arg = some obj/struct with the params for trianing each of the models.
'''
#### try mutliple models
for mdl_id in range(100):
#### define/create graph
graph = tf.Graph()
with graph.as_default():
### get mdl
x = tf.placeholder(float_type, get_x_shape(arg), name='x-input')
y_ = tf.placeholder(float_type, get_y_shape(arg))
y = get_mdl(arg,x)
### get loss and accuracy
loss, accuracy = get_accuracy_loss(arg,x,y,y_)
### get optimizer variables
opt = get_optimizer(arg)
train_step = opt.minimize(loss, global_step=global_step)
#### run session
with tf.Session(graph=graph) as sess:
# train
for i in range(nb_iterations):
batch_xs, batch_ys = get_batch_feed(X_train, Y_train, batch_size)
sess.run(fetches=train_step, feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})
# check_point mdl
if i % report_error_freq == 0:
sess.run(step.assign(i))
#
train_error = sess.run(fetches=loss, feed_dict={x: X_train, y_: Y_train})
test_error = sess.run(fetches=loss, feed_dict={x: X_test, y_: Y_test})
print( 'step %d, train error: %s test_error %s'%(i,train_error,test_error) )
essentially it tries lots of models in one single run but it builds each model in a separate graph and runs each one in a separate session.
I guess my main worry is that its unclear to me how tensorflow under the hood allocates resources for the GPUs to be used. For example, does it load the (part of the) data set only when a session is ran? When I create a graph and a model, is it brought in the GPU immediately or when is it inserted in the GPU? Do I need to clear/free the GPU each time it tries a new model? I don't actually care too much if the models are ran in parallel in multiple GPU (which can be a nice addition), but I want it to first run everything serially without crashing. Is there anything special I need to do for this to work?
Currently I am getting an error that starts as follow:
I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/bfc_allocator.cc:702] Stats:
Limit: 340000768
InUse: 336114944
MaxInUse: 339954944
NumAllocs: 78
MaxAllocSize: 335665152
W tensorflow/core/common_runtime/bfc_allocator.cc:274] ***************************************************xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
W tensorflow/core/common_runtime/bfc_allocator.cc:275] Ran out of memory trying to allocate 160.22MiB. See logs for memory state.
W tensorflow/core/framework/op_kernel.cc:975] Resource exhausted: OOM when allocating tensor with shape[60000,700]
and further down the line it says:
ResourceExhaustedError (see above for traceback): OOM when allocating tensor with shape[60000,700]
[[Node: standardNN/NNLayer1/Z1/add = Add[T=DT_FLOAT, _device="/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/gpu:0"](standardNN/NNLayer1/Z1/MatMul, b1/read)]]
I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:975] Creating TensorFlow device (/gpu:0) -> (device: 0, name: Tesla P100-SXM2-16GB, pci bus id: 0000:06:00.0)
however further down the output file (where it prints) it seems to print fine the errors/messages that should show as training proceeds. Does this mean that it didn't run out of resources? Or was it actually able to use the GPU? If it was able to use the CPU instead of the CPU, when why is this an error only happening when GPU are about to be used?
The weird thing is that the data set is really not that big (all 60K points are 24.5M) and when I run a single model locally in my own computer it seems that the process uses less than 5GB. The GPUs have at least 8GB and the computer with them has plenty of RAM and disk (at least 16GB). Thus, the errors that tensorflow is throwing at me are quite puzzling. What is it trying to do and why are they occurring? Any ideas?
After reading the answer that suggests to use the multiprocessing library I came up with the following script:
def train_mdl(args):
train(mdl,args)
if __name__ == '__main__':
for mdl_id in range(100):
# train one model with some specific hyperparms (assume they are chosen randomly inside the funciton bellow or read from a config file or they could just be passed or something)
p = Process(target=train_mdl, args=(args,))
p.start()
p.join()
print('Done training all models!')
honestly I am not sure why his answer suggests to use pool, or why there are weird tuple brackets but this is what would make sense for me. Would the resources for tensorflow be re-allocated every time a new process is created in the above loop?
I think that running all models in one single script can be bad practice in the long term (see my suggestion below for a better alternative). However, if you would like to do it, here is a solution: You can encapsulate your TF session into a process with the multiprocessing module, this will make sure TF releases the session memory once the process is done. Here is a code snippet:
from multiprocessing import Pool
import contextlib
def my_model((param1, param2, param3)): # Note the extra (), required by the pool syntax
< your code >
num_pool_worker=1 # can be bigger than 1, to enable parallel execution
with contextlib.closing(Pool(num_pool_workers)) as po: # This ensures that the processes get closed once they are done
pool_results = po.map_async(my_model,
((param1, param2, param3)
for param1, param2, param3 in params_list))
results_list = pool_results.get()
Note from OP: The random number generator seed does not reset automatically with the multi-processing library if you choose to use it. Details here: Using python multiprocessing with different random seed for each process
About TF resource allocation: Usually TF allocates much more resources than it needs. Many times you can restrict each process to use a fraction of the total GPU memory, and discover through trial and error the fraction your script requires.
You can do it with the following snippet
gpu_memory_fraction = 0.3 # Choose this number through trial and error
gpu_options = tf.GPUOptions(per_process_gpu_memory_fraction=gpu_memory_fraction,)
session_config = tf.ConfigProto(gpu_options=gpu_options)
sess = tf.Session(config=session_config, graph=graph)
Note that sometimes TF increases the memory usage in order to accelerate the execution. Therefore, reducing the memory usage might make your model run slower.
Answers to the new questions in your edit/comments:
Yes, Tensorflow will be re-allocated every time a new process is created, and cleared once a process ends.
The for-loop in your edit should also do the job. I suggest to use Pool instead, because it will enable you to run several models concurrently on a single GPU. See my notes about setting gpu_memory_fraction and "choosing the maximal number of processes". Also note that: (1) The Pool map runs the loop for you, so you don't need an outer for-loop once you use it. (2) In your example, you should have something like mdl=get_model(args) before calling train()
Weird tuple parenthesis: Pool only accepts a single argument, therefore we use a tuple to pass multiple arguments. See multiprocessing.pool.map and function with two arguments for more details. As suggested in one answer, you can make it more readable with
def train_mdl(params):
(x,y)=params
< your code >
As #Seven suggested, you can use CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES environment variable to choose which GPU to use for your process. You can do it from within your python script using the following on the beginning of the process function (train_mdl).
import os # the import can be on the top of the python script
os.environ["CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES"] = "{}".format(gpu_id)
A better practice for executing your experiments would be to isolate your training/evaluation code from the hyper parameters/ model search code.
E.g. have a script named train.py, which accepts a specific combination of hyper parameters and references to your data as arguments, and executes training for a single model.
Then, to iterate through the all the possible combinations of parameters you can use a simple task (jobs) queue, and submit all the possible combinations of hyper-parametrs as separate jobs. The task queue will feed your jobs one at a time to your machine. Usually, you can also set the queue to execute number of processes concurrently (see details below).
Specifically, I use task spooler, which is super easy to install and handful (doesn't requires admin privileges, details below).
Basic usage is (see notes below about task spooler usage):
ts <your-command>
In practice, I have a separate python script that manages my experiments, set all the arguments per specific experiment and send the jobs to the ts queue.
Here are some relevant snippets of python code from my experiments manager:
run_bash executes a bash command
def run_bash(cmd):
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, executable='/bin/bash')
out = p.stdout.read().strip()
return out # This is the stdout from the shell command
The next snippet sets the number of concurrent processes to be run (see note below about choosing the maximal number of processes):
max_job_num_per_gpu = 2
run_bash('ts -S %d'%max_job_num_per_gpu)
The next snippet iterates through a list of all combinations of hyper params / model params. Each element of the list is a dictionary, where the keys are the command line arguments for the train.py script
for combination_dict in combinations_list:
job_cmd = 'python train.py ' + ' '.join(
['--{}={}'.format(flag, value) for flag, value in combination_dict.iteritems()])
submit_cmd = "ts bash -c '%s'" % job_cmd
run_bash(submit_cmd)
A note about about choosing the maximal number of processes:
If you are short on GPUs, you can use gpu_memory_fraction you found, to set the number of processes as max_job_num_per_gpu=int(1/gpu_memory_fraction)
Notes about task spooler (ts):
You could set the number of concurrent processes to run ("slots") with:
ts -S <number-of-slots>
Installing ts doesn't requires admin privileges. You can download and compile it from source with a simple make, add it to your path and you're done.
You can set up multiple queues (I use it for multiple GPUs), with
TS_SOCKET=<path_to_queue_name> ts <your-command>
e.g.
TS_SOCKET=/tmp/socket-ts.gpu_queue_1 ts <your-command>
TS_SOCKET=/tmp/socket-ts.gpu_queue_2 ts <your-command>
See here for further usage example
A note about automatically setting the path names and file names:
Once you separate your main code from the experiment manager, you will need an efficient way to generate file names and directory names, given the hyper-params. I usually keep my important hyper params in a dictionary and use the following function to generate a single chained string from the dictionary key-value pairs.
Here are the functions I use for doing it:
def build_string_from_dict(d, sep='%'):
"""
Builds a string from a dictionary.
Mainly used for formatting hyper-params to file names.
Key-value pairs are sorted by the key name.
Args:
d: dictionary
Returns: string
:param d: input dictionary
:param sep: key-value separator
"""
return sep.join(['{}={}'.format(k, _value2str(d[k])) for k in sorted(d.keys())])
def _value2str(val):
if isinstance(val, float):
# %g means: "Floating point format.
# Uses lowercase exponential format if exponent is less than -4 or not less than precision,
# decimal format otherwise."
val = '%g' % val
else:
val = '{}'.format(val)
val = re.sub('\.', '_', val)
return val
As I understand, firstly tensorflow constructs a symbolic graph and infers the derivatives based on chain rule. Then allocates memory for all (necessary) tensors, including some inputs and outputs of layers for efficiency. When running a session, data will be loaded into the graph but in general, memory use will not change any more.
The error you met, I guess, may be caused by constructing several models in one GPU.
Isolating your training/evaluation code from the hyper parameters is a good choice, as #user2476373 proposed. But I am using bash script directly, not task spooler (may be it's more convenient), e.g.
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python train.py --lrn_rate 0.01 --weight_decay_rate 0.001 --momentum 0.9 --batch_size 8 --max_iter 60000 --snapshot 5000
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python eval.py
Or you can write a 'for' loop in the bash script, not necessarily in python script. Noting that I used CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 at beginning of the script (the index could be 7 if you have 8 GPUs in one machine). Because based on my experience, I've found that tensorflow uses all GPUs in one machine if I didn't specify operations use which GPU with the code like this
with tf.device('/gpu:0'):
If you want to try multi-GPU implementation, there is some example.
Hope this could help you.
An easy solution: Give each model a unique session and graph.
It works for this platform: TensorFlow 1.12.0, Keras 2.1.6-tf, Python 3.6.7, Jupyter Notebook.
Key code:
with session.as_default():
with session.graph.as_default():
# do something about an ANN model
Full code:
import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow import keras
import gc
def limit_memory():
""" Release unused memory resources. Force garbage collection """
keras.backend.clear_session()
keras.backend.get_session().close()
tf.reset_default_graph()
gc.collect()
#cfg = tf.ConfigProto()
#cfg.gpu_options.allow_growth = True
#keras.backend.set_session(tf.Session(config=cfg))
keras.backend.set_session(tf.Session())
gc.collect()
def create_and_train_ANN_model(hyper_parameter):
print('create and train my ANN model')
info = { 'result about this ANN model' }
return info
for i in range(10):
limit_memory()
session = tf.Session()
keras.backend.set_session(session)
with session.as_default():
with session.graph.as_default():
hyper_parameter = { 'A set of hyper-parameters' }
info = create_and_train_ANN_model(hyper_parameter)
limit_memory()
Inspired by this link: Keras (Tensorflow backend) Error - Tensor input_1:0, specified in either feed_devices or fetch_devices was not found in the Graph
I have the same issue. My solution is to run from another script doing the following as many times and in as many hyperparameter configurations as you want.
cmd = "python3 ./model_train.py hyperparameters"
os.system(cmd)
You probably don't want to do this.
If you run thousands and thousands of models on your data, and pick the one that evaluates best, you are not doing machine learning; instead you are memorizing your data set, and there is no guarantee that the model you pick will perform at all outside that data set.
In other words, that approach is similar to having a single model, which has thousands of degrees of liberty. Having a model with such high order of complexity is problematic, since it will be able to fit your data better than is actually warranted; such a model is annoyingly able to memorize any noise (outliers, measurement errors, and such) in your training data, which causes the model to perform poorly when the noise is even slightly different.
(Apologies for posting this as an answer, the site wouldn't let me add a comment.)

Mulitprocessing and rpy2 (with ape)

I ran into this today and can't figure out why. I have several functions chained together that perform some time consuming operations as part of a larger pipeline. I've included these here, pared down to a test example, as best as I could. The issue is that when I call a function directly, I get the expected output (e.g., 5 different trees). However, when I call the same function in a multiprocessing pool with apply_async (or apply, doesn't matter), I get 5 trees, but they are all the same.
I've documented this in an IPython notebook, which can be viewed here: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/cfriedline/0e275d528ff1a8d674c6
In cell 91, I create 5 trees (each with 10 tips), and return two lists. The first containing the non-multiprocessing trees, and the second from apply_async.
In cell 92, you can see the results of creating trees without multiprocessing, and in 93, with multiprocessing.
What I expect is that there would be a total of 10 different trees between the two tests, but instead all of the multiprocessing trees are identical. Makes little sense to me.
Relevant versions of things:
Linux 2.6.18-238.12.1.el5 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Python 2.7.6 :: Anaconda 1.9.2 (64-bit)
IPython 2.0.0
Rpy2 2.3.9
Thanks!
Chris
I solved this one, with a point in the right direction from #mgilson. In fact, it was a random number problem, just not in python - in R (sigh). The state of R is copied when the Pool is created, meaning so is its random seed. To fix, just a little rpy2 as below calling R's set.seed function (with some process specific stuff for good measure):
def create_tree(num_tips, type):
"""
creates the taxa tree in R
#param num_tips: number of taxa to create
#param type: type for naming (e.g., 'taxa')
#return: a dendropy Tree
#rtype: dendropy.Tree
"""
r = rpy2.robjects.r
set_seed = r('set.seed')
set_seed(int((time.time()+os.getpid()*1000)))
rpy2.robjects.globalenv['numtips'] = num_tips
rpy2.robjects.globalenv['treetype'] = type
name = _get_random_string(20)
if type == "T":
r("%s = rtree(numtips, rooted=T, tip.label=paste(treetype, seq(1:(numtips)), sep=''))" % name)
else:
r("%s = rtree(numtips, rooted=F, tip.label=paste(treetype, seq(1:(numtips)), sep=''))" % name)
tree = r[name]
return ape_to_dendropy(tree)
I'm not 100% familiar with these libraries, however, on Linux, (IIRC) multiprocessing uses os.fork. This means that the state of the random module (which you're using) will also be forked and that each of your processes will generate the same sequence of random numbers resulting in a not-so-random _get_random_string function.
If I'm right, and you make the pool smaller than the number of trees that you want, you should see that you get groups of N identical trees (where N is the number of pools).
I think that probably the ideal solution is to re-seed the random number generator inside of each of the processes. It's unlikely that they'll run at exactly the same time, so you should get differing results.

numpy OpenBLAS set maximum number of threads

I am using numpy and my model involves intensive matrix-matrix multiplication.
To speed up, I use OpenBLAS multi-threaded library to parallelize the numpy.dot function.
My setting is as follows,
OS : CentOS 6.2 server #CPUs = 12, #MEM = 96GB
python version: Python2.7.6
numpy : numpy 1.8.0
OpenBLAS + IntelMKL
$ OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 python test_mul.py
code, of which I took from https://gist.github.com/osdf/
test_mul.py :
import numpy
import sys
import timeit
try:
import numpy.core._dotblas
print 'FAST BLAS'
except ImportError:
print 'slow blas'
print "version:", numpy.__version__
print "maxint:", sys.maxint
print
x = numpy.random.random((1000,1000))
setup = "import numpy; x = numpy.random.random((1000,1000))"
count = 5
t = timeit.Timer("numpy.dot(x, x.T)", setup=setup)
print "dot:", t.timeit(count)/count, "sec"
when I use OMP_NUM_THREADS=1 python test_mul.py, the result is
dot: 0.200172233582 sec
OMP_NUM_THREADS=2
dot: 0.103047609329 sec
OMP_NUM_THREADS=4
dot: 0.0533880233765 sec
things go well.
However, when I set OMP_NUM_THREADS=8.... the code starts to "occasionally works".
sometimes it works, sometimes it does not even run and and gives me core dumps.
when OMP_NUM_THREADS > 10. the code seems to break all the time..
I am wondering what is happening here ? Is there something like a MAXIMUM number threads that each process can use ? Can I raise that limit, given that I have 12 CPUs in my machine ?
Thanks
Firstly, I don't really understand what you mean by 'OpenBLAS + IntelMKL'. Both of those are BLAS libraries, and numpy should only link to one of them at runtime. You should probably check which of these two numpy is actually using. You can do this by calling:
$ ldd <path-to-site-packages>/numpy/core/_dotblas.so
Update: numpy/core/_dotblas.so was removed in numpy v1.10, but you can check the linkage of numpy/core/multiarray.so instead.
For example, I link against OpenBLAS:
...
libopenblas.so.0 => /opt/OpenBLAS/lib/libopenblas.so.0 (0x00007f788c934000)
...
If you are indeed linking against OpenBLAS, did you build it from source? If you did, you should see that in the Makefile.rule there is a commented option:
...
# You can define maximum number of threads. Basically it should be
# less than actual number of cores. If you don't specify one, it's
# automatically detected by the the script.
# NUM_THREADS = 24
...
By default OpenBLAS will try to set the maximum number of threads to use automatically, but you could try uncommenting and editing this line yourself if it is not detecting this correctly.
Also, bear in mind that you will probably see diminishing returns in terms of performance from using more threads. Unless your arrays are very large it is unlikely that using more than 6 threads will give much of a performance boost because of the increased overhead involved in thread creation and management.

multiple cpu usage when accessing data attached to traited classes

I have an application that uses a number of classes inheriting from HasTraits. Some of these classes manage access to data and others provide functions for analyzing that data. This works wonderfully for a gui -- I can check that the data and analysis code is doing what it should. However, I've noticed that when I use these classes for gui-less computations, all the cpus on the system end up getting used.
Here is a small example that shows the cpu usage:
from traits.api import HasTraits, List, Int, Enum, Instance
import numpy as np
import psutil
from itertools import combinations
"""
Small example of high CPU usage by traited classes
"""
class DataStorage(HasTraits):
nsamples = Int(2000)
samples = List
def _samples_default(self):
return np.random.randn(self.nsamples,2000).tolist()
def sample_samples(self,indices):
""" return a 2D array of data at indices """
return np.array(
[self.samples[i] for i in indices])
class DataAccessor(HasTraits):
""" Class that grabs data and computes something """
measure = Enum("correlation","covariance")
data_source = Instance(DataStorage,())
def compute_measure(self,indices):
""" example of some computation """
samples = self.data_source.sample_samples(indices)
percentage = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=0, percpu=True)
if self.measure == "correlation":
result = np.corrcoef(samples)
elif self.measure == "covariance":
result = np.cov(samples)
return percentage
# Run a simulation to see cpu usage
analyzer = DataAccessor()
usage = []
n_iterations = 0
max_iterations = 500
for combo in combinations(np.arange(2000),500):
# evaluate the measurement on a subset of the data
usage.append(analyzer.compute_measure(combo))
n_iterations += 1
if n_iterations > max_iterations:
break
print n_iterations
use_percents = np.array(usage).T
When I run this on an 8-cpu machine running CentOS, top reports the python process at roughly 600%.
>>> use_percents.mean(1)
shows
array([ 67.05548902, 67.06906188, 66.89041916, 67.28942116,
66.69421158, 67.61437126, 99.8007984 , 67.31996008])
Question:
My computation is embarrassingly parallel, so it would be great to have the other cpus available to split up the job. Does anyone know what's happening here? A plain python version of this uses 100% on a single cpu.
Is there a way to keep everything local to a single cpu without rewriting all my classes without traits?
Traits is not causing the CPU usage. It's easy to rewrite this bit of code without Traits, and you will see that you get the same pattern of CPU usage (at least, I do).
Instead, what you are probably seeing is the CPU usage of the BLAS library that your build of numpy is linked against. numpy.corrcoeff() calls numpy.cov(), and much of the computation of numpy.cov() is taken up by a numpy.dot() call, which does a matrix-matrix multiplication using BLAS. If it is an optimized BLAS library, then it will usually use non-Python threads internally to split up these computations among your CPUs. You will have to consult the documentation of your optimized BLAS library to find out how to change this.

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