Tensorflow Eager mode: First execution on GPU slow - python

The code below compares computation time on the CPU vs GPU. Only for the first execution, I get slower runtime on GPU than CPU, and in all subsequent runs the GPU is much faster. Why is the first run on GPU slow? How do I make even the first run on GPU fast?
from __future__ import absolute_import, division, print_function
import tensorflow as tf
tf.enable_eager_execution()
import time
def time_matmul(x):
start = time.time()
for loop in range(10):
tf.matmul(x, x)
result = time.time()-start
print("10 loops: {:0.2f}ms".format(1000*result))
print("On GPU:")
# Force execution on GPU #0 if available
if tf.test.is_gpu_available():
with tf.device("GPU:0"): # Or GPU:1 for the 2nd GPU, GPU:2 for the 3rd etc.
x = tf.random_uniform([1000, 1000])
assert x.device.endswith("GPU:0")
time_matmul(x)
# Force execution on CPU
print("On CPU:")
with tf.device("CPU:0"):
x = tf.random_uniform([1000, 1000])
assert x.device.endswith("CPU:0")
time_matmul(x)
Output on first run:
On GPU:
10 loops: 443.04ms
On CPU:
10 loops: 100.01ms
Output on subsequent runs:
On GPU:
10 loops: 1.00ms
On CPU:
10 loops: 103.01ms
PS: This is different from a seemingly related question because tf.device("GPU:0") already chooses /device:GPU:0 and not /device:XLA_GPU:0

Out of curiosity I have tried the OP script 3 years later. The same situation happens on the latest version of TF, CUDA (yet an old GTX1050 card). A possible explanation is data movement.
On the first runs---either GPU or CPU---data moves around, ready for action. Data movements are well-known to slow things down significantly. CPU memory is physically "closer" than GPU memory, the latter usually on an external board. The default compute is the CPU and its memory, so a program is almost ready for CPU runs---little or nothing to move, and basically staying on the same chip. GPU memory is physically a different chip, "far away", so moving there is likely to take much more time.
This thinking can be supported by looping over the OP script (slight change to match TF2.9.1):
import tensorflow as tf
tf.compat.v1.enable_eager_execution()
import time
def time_matmul(run, x):
start = time.time()
for loop in range(10):
tf.matmul(x, x)
result = time.time()-start
print(f"Run #{run}: {1000*result:0.2f}ms")
print("On GPU:")
# Force execution on GPU #0 if available
if tf.test.is_gpu_available():
with tf.device("GPU:0"): # Or GPU:1 for the 2nd GPU, GPU:2 for the 3rd etc.
x = tf.random.uniform([1000, 1000])
assert x.device.endswith("GPU:0")
for run in range(10):
time_matmul(run, x)
# Force execution on CPU
print("On CPU:")
with tf.device("CPU:0"):
x = tf.random.uniform([1000, 1000])
assert x.device.endswith("CPU:0")
for run in range(10):
time_matmul(run, x)
Which results in:
Run #0: 273.66ms
Run #1: 0.37ms
Run #2: 0.36ms
Run #3: 0.36ms
Run #4: 0.37ms
Run #5: 0.36ms
Run #6: 0.35ms
Run #7: 0.41ms
Run #8: 0.37ms
Run #9: 0.35ms
On CPU:
Run #0: 56.89ms
Run #1: 44.31ms
Run #2: 47.60ms
Run #3: 46.97ms
Run #4: 46.40ms
Run #5: 44.84ms
Run #6: 43.88ms
Run #7: 45.28ms
Run #8: 43.46ms
Run #9: 43.57ms
Eye-balling what happens (a proper stats approach would run that many times, done but no more insight) the first run is slow, but then faster, and more importantly stable. Stability is what we expect in the first place (run the same should behave the same), but the first run needs to be setup by placing the data at the "right" place in memory.
I am not aware of APIs to place the data manually, and then start the runs. But this would be an "illusion". Run #0 here includes movement and computation. Splitting the two would likely make Run #0 as fast as all other runs, yet we still have to move the data beforehand---the required time would just not show in the result table...
Please note this memory movement is a likely cause (abductive reasoning here), and there might be something else happening. The thinking is supported by the script result, yet it just allows to conclude memory movement is a likely cause. This post proves nothing. A proper analysis to get the root cause would require more time with a profiler (and a Python profiler may not be enough).
Aside this disclaimer, it really looks like a memory movement cost we observe here.

Related

What might cause a GPU to hang/get stuck when using multiprocessing in Python?

TL;DR: using PyTorch with Optuna with multiprocessing done with Queue(), a GPU (out of 4) can hang. Probably not a deadlock. Any ideas?
Normal version:
I am using PyTorch in combination with Optuna (a hyperparameter optimization framework; basically starts different trials for one model with different parameters, see: https://optuna.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) for my model training on a setup with 4 GPUs. Here, I've been looking for a way to distribute the workload more efficiently on the GPUs, hence I explored the multiprocessing library.
The core of the multiprocessing code looks like following:
class GpuQueue:
def __init__(self):
self.queue = multiprocessing.Manager().Queue()
all_idxs = list(range(N_GPUS)) if N_GPUS > 0 else [None]
for idx in all_idxs:
self.queue.put(idx)
#contextmanager
def one_gpu_per_process(self):
current_idx = self.queue.get()
yield current_idx
self.queue.put(current_idx)
class Objective:
def __init__(self, gpu_queue: GpuQueue, params, signals):
self.gpu_queue = gpu_queue
# create dataset
# ...
def __call__(self, trial: optuna.Trial):
with self.gpu_queue.one_gpu_per_process() as gpu_i:
val = trainer(trial, gpu=gpu_i, ...)
return val
And in main, optuna study and optuna optimize are initiated with:
study = optuna.create_study(direction="minimize", sampler = optuna.samplers.TPESampler(seed=17)) # storage = "sqlite:///trials.db")
study.optimize(Objective(GpuQueue(), ..., n_jobs=4))
Same implementation can be found in this StackOverflow post (used as inspiration): Is there a way to pass arguments to multiple jobs in optuna?
What this code does is that every trial gets its own GPU, hence the GPU usage and distribution is better than other methods. However it happens often that a GPU is stuck and just 'shuts itself off' and does not finish the trial, hence the code actually never finishes running and that GPU is never freed.
Say, for example, that I am running 100 trials, then trial 1,2,3,4 get assigned GPUs 0,1,2,3 (not always in that order), and whenever a GPU is freed, say GPU 2, it takes on trial 5, etc. The issue is, it can happen that the trial that the GPU is assigned to 'quits' in the process and never finishes the trial, hence not taking on another trial and resulting in the run with many trials not completing.
I suspected a deadlock, but apparently Queue() is thread-safe (see: Is Python multiprocessing.Queue thread safe?).
Any clue on what can cause the hang and what I can look for?

Multithreading degrades GPU performance

In my Python application I am using Detectron2 to run prediction on an image and detect the key-points of all the humans in the image.
I want to run the prediction on frames that are streamed to my app live (using aiortc), but I discovered that the predictions time is much worse because it now runs on a new thread (the main thread is occupied with the server).
Running predictions on a thread takes anywhere between 1.5 to 4 seconds, which is a lot.
When running the predictions on the main-thread (without the video streaming part), I get predictions times of less than a second.
My question is why it happens and how can I fix it¿ Why the GPU performance is degraded so drastically when using it from a new thread¿
Notes:
The code is tested in Google Colab with Tesla P100 GPU and the video streaming is emulated by reading frames from a video file.
I calculate the time it takes to run prediction on a frame using the code in this question.
I tried switching to multiprocessing instead, but couldn't make it work with cuda (I tried both import multiprocessing as well as import torch.multiprocessing with set_stratup_method('spawn')) it just gets stuck when calling start on the process.
Example code:
from detectron2 import model_zoo
from detectron2.engine import DefaultPredictor
from detectron2.config import get_cfg
import threading
from typing import List
import numpy as np
import timeit
import cv2
# Prepare the configuration file
cfg = get_cfg()
cfg.merge_from_file(model_zoo.get_config_file("COCO-Keypoints/keypoint_rcnn_R_50_FPN_3x.yaml"))
cfg.MODEL.ROI_HEADS.SCORE_THRESH_TEST = 0.7 # set threshold for this model
cfg.MODEL.WEIGHTS = model_zoo.get_checkpoint_url("COCO-Keypoints/keypoint_rcnn_R_50_FPN_3x.yaml")
cfg.MODEL.DEVICE = "cuda"
predictor = DefaultPredictor(cfg)
def get_frames(video: cv2.VideoCapture):
frames = list()
while True:
has_frame, frame = video.read()
if not has_frame:
break
frames.append(frame)
return frames
class CodeTimer:
# Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52749808/9977758
def __init__(self, name=None):
self.name = " '" + name + "'" if name else ''
def __enter__(self):
self.start = timeit.default_timer()
def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, traceback):
self.took = (timeit.default_timer() - self.start) * 1000.0
print('Code block' + self.name + ' took: ' + str(self.took) + ' ms')
video = cv2.VideoCapture('DemoVideo.mp4')
num_frames = round(video.get(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_COUNT))
frames_buffer = list()
predictions = list()
def send_frames():
# This function emulates the stream, so here we "get" a frame and add it to our buffer
for frame in get_frames(video):
frames_buffer.append(frame)
# Simulate delays between frames
time.sleep(random.uniform(0.3, 2.1))
def predict_frames():
predicted_frames = 0 # The number of frames predicted so far
while predicted_frames < num_frames: # Stop after we predicted all frames
buffer_length = len(frames_buffer)
if buffer_length <= predicted_frames:
continue # Wait until we get a new frame
# Read all the frames from the point we stopped
for frame in frames_buffer[predicted_frames:]:
# Measure the prediction time
with CodeTimer('In stream prediction'):
predictions.append(predictor(frame))
predicted_frames += 1
t1 = threading.Thread(target=send_frames)
t1.start()
t2 = threading.Thread(target=predict_frames)
t2.start()
t1.join()
t2.join()
Python threads rely on the GIL which must be locked by all C bindings trying to access Python objects. GPU computing libraries typically use C bindings, and could potentially lock the GIL from time to time and thus pause Python code execution.
It is a wild guess, but this is possible that the predictor function, which needs to go through C and a lock of the GIL finds itself waiting for the other threads that are writing the video buffers. Then depending on how the computation is broken down and how Python juggles with your other thread, I suppose the impact on performance may become visible.
You may:
avoid multi-threading by performing the reading and the prediction in the same thread.
use multi-processing so that the GIL does not interfere between the two processes
code this in a native language such as C, C++...
The problem is in: your hardware, your libraries or, in the differences between your example code and the real code.
I implemented your code on an Nvidia Jetson Xavier. I installed all needed libraries using the following commands:
# first create your virtual env
virtualenv -p python3 detectron_gpu
source detectron_gpu/bin/activate
#torch for jetson
wget https://nvidia.box.com/shared/static/p57jwntv436lfrd78inwl7iml6p13fzh.whl -O torch-1.8.0-cp36-cp36m-linux_aarch64.whl
sudo apt-get install python3-pip libopenblas-base libopenmpi-dev
pip3 install Cython
pip3 install numpy torch-1.8.0-cp36-cp36m-linux_aarch64.whl
# torchvision
pip install 'git+https://github.com/pytorch/vision.git#v0.9.0'
# detectron
python -m pip install 'git+https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2.git'
# ipython bindings (optional)
pip install ipykernel cloudpickle
# opencv
pip install opencv-python
After that I run your example script on an example video and received the following output:
Code block 'In stream prediction' took: 2932.241764000537 ms
Code block 'In stream prediction' took: 409.69691300051636 ms
Code block 'In stream prediction' took: 410.03823099981673 ms
Code block 'In stream prediction' took: 409.4023269999525 ms
After the first pass, the detector consistently takes around 400ms to run the detection. Which seems about right for an Jetson Xavier. I do not experience the slowdown you described.
I have to note that the Jetson is a specific piece of hardware. In this hardware the RAM memory is shared between the CPU and the GPU. Therefore I do not have to transfer the data from CPU to GPU. So if your slow down is caused by the transfer between CPU and GPU memory, I will not experience this problem in my setup.
Not seeing the full code, here is a few suggestions:
You might be running into overhead of starting new threads every time. So explore option of the thread pool instead of starting new threads every time.
If you are not moving workload to GPU - that means it's CPU bound task and Python threads is not the right tool for the task. For CPU intensive tasks you should be using https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html#module-multiprocessing
Some operations are I/O bound. For example, each cv2.imread call results in I/O overhead. You can read this article which says : "Not all algorithms can be made parallel and distributed to all cores of a processor — some algorithms are simply single threaded in nature."
This means that multiprocessing for computer vision algorithms must be global: a single operation (such as imread) will not be improved by multithreading. However, you will sometimes gain speed by performing other operations in parallel because they are not limited by I/O or anything else. At this point, you will probably see an overall speedup:
If you run single imread:
non-multithreaded: 5 ms = cost of imread
multithreaded: 7 ms = cost of multithreading + cost of imread
But if you run operations that can be multithreaded :
non multithreaded: 5 ms + 10 ms = cost of imread + cost of operation
multi-threaded: 2ms + 5 ms + 5 ms = cost of multithreading + cost of imread + cost of parallel operations
(these figures are not real, they are just to illustrate what I mean)

dask.delayed results in no speedup

I am trying to get into Dask. For that I attempted to parallelize some time consuming sequential code I got. The original code is this:
def sequential():
sims = []
chunksize = len(tokens)//4
for i in range(0, len(tokens), chunksize):
print(i, i+chunksize)
chunk = tokens[i:i+chunksize]
sims.append(process(chunk))
return sims
%time sequential()
and the prallelized code is this:
def parallel():
sims = []
chunksize = len(tokens)//4
for i in range(0, len(tokens), chunksize):
print(i, i+chunksize)
chunk = dask.delayed(tokens[i:i+chunksize])
sims.append(dask.delayed(process)(chunk))
return dask.delayed(sims)
%time parallel().visualize()
But the parallelized code always runs around 10% slower than the parallel one. when I visualize the computation graph for sims I get this:
Not sure where list-#8 comes from, but other than that it looks correct. So why is there no speedup? When I look into htop I can see 3 cores active (~30% load each), while for the sequential code I see only 1 core active (100% load). The sequential code runs 7 minutes and the parallel code runs 7 - 8 minutes.
I guess I am misunderstanding how delayed and compute should be used here?
The setup is this, if you require it:
import numpy
import spacy
import dask
nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_lg')
tokens = [t for t in nlp(" ".join(t.strip() for t in open('./words.txt','r').readlines())) if len(t.text) > 1 and len(t.text) < 20]
def process(chunk):
sims = numpy.zeros([len(chunk),len(tokens)], dtype=numpy.float32)
for i in range(len(chunk)):
for j in range(len(tokens)):
sims[i,j] = chunk[i].similarity(tokens[j])
return sims
You are seeing this behaviour because the default execution engine for dask is based on multiple threads in a single process (the "threaded" scheduler). Python has a lock, the GIL, which ensures the safety of the interpreter by only executing one python statement at a time. Therefore, each thread is spending most of its time waiting for the lock to become available.
To avoid this problem, you have two options:
find a version of your computation that releases the GIL. This is possible if you can phrase it as (mainly) some numpy, pandas, numba, etc., computation, code that executes at the C level and doesn't need the interpreter, unlike your nested loops.
run your code using processes, using either the "mutiprocessing" scheduler or (better) the "distributed" scheduler which, despite the name, also runs well on a single machine.
Further information: http://dask.pydata.org/en/latest/scheduler-overview.html

performance measurement in Tensorflow's eager mode

In tensorflow's guide about the performance of eager execution, there is a piece of code as follows:
import time
def measure(x, steps):
# TensorFlow initializes a GPU the first time it's used, exclude from timing.
tf.matmul(x, x)
start = time.time()
for i in range(steps):
x = tf.matmul(x, x)
_ = x.numpy() # Make sure to execute op and not just enqueue it
end = time.time()
return end - start
...
with tf.device("/cpu:0"):
print("CPU: {} secs".format(measure(tf.random_normal(shape), steps)))
with tf.device("/gpu:0"):
print("GPU: {} secs".format(measure(tf.random_normal(shape), steps)))
what is the meaning of the code before the second comment: "_ = x.numpy()"?
If I comment out this line, will tf.matmul(x,x) not be executed on cpu/gpu?
Technically, the call to tf.matmul can return before the matrix multiplication is complete.
In practice:
If executing on the CPU (and not using execution_mode=tf.contrib.eager.ASYNC), then tf.matmul returns only after the matrix multiplication has completed.
If executing on the GPU, then tf.matmul returns after enqueueing the matrix multiplication on the CUDA stream (see NVIDIA developer documentation for more information on streams)
The .numpy() call causes the result to be copied back to host memory (since numpy arrays must be backed by host and not GPU memory). In order to correctly do that, it has to wait for all compute operations enqueued on the CUDA stream to complete. Thus the .numpy() call is a means of ensuring "the CUDA stream has been processed". The intent there is to ensure that end - start accounts for the time it takes the operation to complete, not just be enqueued on the CUDA stream.
That said, that code snippet seems like it is over-estimating time executed on GPU since it also includes the time to copy to host after each step. That _ = x.numpy() line should be moved outside the for loop to get a more accurate measure (i.e., time to execute matrix multiplication steps times, then wait for the CUDA stream to finish, and copy to host memory once). Ideally, we would be able to exclude the time it takes to copy back to host memory.
Hope that makes sense.

How to profile CPU usage of a Python script?

Ideally what I want is to record the CPU usage of a Python script that is executing a deep neural net Keras model. I'm looking for the CPU equivalent of memory_profiler, which provides the memory consumption of a process.
I have looked at using psutil (suggested in this answer) which would indicate my script could contain some variant of
p = psutil.Process(current_pid)
p.cpu_percent()
but the problem is the important function call I really want to capture the effect of would be the inference stage of the model
model.predict(x_test)
and if I run psutil before/after this step the CPU usage recorded won't be a true reflection of the CPU usage of the process.
So then I was thinking could I use something like top/htop to log the CPU usage of the script to some file, capturing the fluctuating CPU usage while the process
is running, and then calculate an average (or something similar) after the fact. The issue I see with this, however, is don't I need to know the PID to utilise top,
so how can I use top to monitor the script before it is executed (and hasn't even been assigned a PID)?
I can see this highly-ranked answer suggests
cProfile which gives the running time of functions within a script. Although this isn't exactly what I want I do notice that it returns
the total number of CPU seconds, which would at least let me compare CPU usage in that regard.
You can run model.predict(x_test) in a subprocess and log its CPU usage simultaneously in the main process. For example,
import time
import multiprocessing as mp
import psutil
import numpy as np
from keras.models import load_model
def run_predict():
model = load_model('1.h5')
x_test = np.random.rand(10000, 1000)
time.sleep(1)
for _ in range(3):
model.predict(x_test)
time.sleep(0.5)
def monitor(target):
worker_process = mp.Process(target=target)
worker_process.start()
p = psutil.Process(worker_process.pid)
# log cpu usage of `worker_process` every 10 ms
cpu_percents = []
while worker_process.is_alive():
cpu_percents.append(p.cpu_percent())
time.sleep(0.01)
worker_process.join()
return cpu_percents
cpu_percents = monitor(target=run_predict)
The values in cpu_percents for the above script would be something like:

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