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How Tensorflow(2.0) distributed dataset manage data

I'm a newbie to Tensorflow. I have been learning how to use TensorFlow to train models in a distributed manner and I have access to multiple servers, each with multiple CPUs.
Training mechanisms are clearly outlined in documentation and tutorials, but there are some ambiguities regarding data management while training multiple workers. In my understanding, data should be shared and stored on a single machine, and tf.distribute.DistributedDataset distributes data among workers.
Is my understanding that shared data is stored on one machine correct?
Think of a situation where we have multiple workers in our network and we want to train a model for 10 epochs on a large dataset. Is it true that tf.distribute.DistributedDataset sends data to workers 10 times? Are there any mechanisms to prevent the same batches of data from being sent to the same worker ten times?
This post, for instance, states that:
Spark and HDFS are designed to work well together. When Spark needs some data from HDFS, it grabs the closest copy which minimizes the time data spends traveling around the network.
I'm looking for something similar for Tensorflow's distributed training.

Training multiple neural networks asynchronously in parallel

The problem
I am currently working on a project that I sadly can't share with you. The project is about hyper-parameter optimization for neural networks, and it requires that I train multiple neural network models (more than I can store on my GPU) in parallel. The network architectures stay the same, but the network parameters and hyper-parameters are subjected to change between each training interval. I am currently achieving this using PyTorch on a linux environment in order to allow my NVIDIA GTX 1660 (6GB RAM) to use the multiprocessing feature that PyTorch provides.
Code (simplified):
def training_function(checkpoint):
load(checkpoint)
train(checkpoint)
unload(checkpoint)
for step in range(training_steps):
trained_checkpoints = list()
for trained_checkpoint in pool.imap_unordered(training_function, checkpoints):
trained_checkpoints.append(trained_checkpoint)
for optimized_checkpoint in optimize(trained_checkpoints):
checkpoints.update(optimized_checkpoint)
I currently test with a population of 30 neural networks (i.e. 30 checkpoints) with the MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets which consists of 70 000 (50k training, 10k validation, 10k testing) 28x28 images with 1 channel each respectively. The network I train is a simple Lenet5 implementation.
I use a torch.multiprocessing pool and allow 7 processes to be spawned. Each process uses some of the GPU memory available just to initialize the CUDA environment in each process. After training, the checkpoints are adapted with my hyper-parameter optimization technique.
The load function in the training_function loads the model- and optimizer state (holds the network parameter tensors) from a local file into GPU memory using torch.load. The unload saves the newly trained states back to file using torch.save and deletes them from memory. I do this because PyTorch will only detach GPU tensors when no variable is referencing them. I have to do this because I have limited GPU memory.
The current setup works, but each CUDA initialization occupies over 700MB of GPU RAM, and so I am interested if there are other ways I could do this that may use less memory without a penalty to efficiency.
My attempts
I suspected I could use a thread pool in order to save some memory, and it did. By spawning 7 threads instead of 7 processes, CUDA was only initialized once, which saved almost half of my memory. However, this lead to a new problem in which the GPU only utilized approx. 30% utilization according to nvidia-smi that I am monitoring in a separate linux terminal. Without threads, I get around 85-90% utilization.
I also messed around with torch.multiprocessing.set_sharing_strategy which is currently set to 'file_descriptor', but with no luck.
My questions
Is there a better way to work with multiple model- and optimizer states without saving and loading them to files while training? I have tried to move the model to CPU using model.cpu() before saving the state_dict, but this did not work in my implementation (memory leaks).
Is there an efficient way I can train multiple neural networks at the same time that uses less GPU memory? When searching the web, I only find references to nn.DataParallel which trains the same model over multiple GPUs by copying it to each GPU. This does not work for my problem.
I will soon have access to multiple, more powerful GPUs with more memory, and I suspect this problem will be less annoying then, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a better solution I am not getting.
Update (09.03.2020)
For any future readers, if you set out to do something similar to the pseudo code displayed above, and you plan on using multiple GPUs, please make sure to create one multiprocessing pool for each GPU device. Pools don't execute functions in order with the underlying processes it contains, and so you will end up initializing CUDA multiple times on the same process, wasting memory.
Another important note is that while you may be passing the device (e.g. 'cuda:1') to every torch.cuda-function, you may discover that torch does something with the default cuda device 'cuda:0' somewhere in the code, initializing CUDA on that device for every process, which wastes memory on an unwanted and non-needed CUDA initialization. I fixed this issue by using with torch.cuda.device(device_id) that encapsulate the entire training_function.
I ended up not using multiprocessing pools and instead defined my own custom process class that holds the device and training function. This means I have to maintain in-queues for each device-process, but they all share the same out-queue, meaning I can retrieve the results the moment they are available. I figured writing a custom process class was simpler than writing a custom pool class. I desperately tried to keep using pools as they are easily maintained, but I had to use multiple imap-functions, and so the results were not obtainable one at a time, which lead to a less efficient training-loop.
I am now successfully training on multiple GPUs, but my questions posted above still remains unanswered.
Update (10.03.2020)
I have implemented another way to store model- and optimizer statedicts outside of GPU RAM. I have written function that replaces every tensor in the dicts with it's .to('cpu') equivalent. This costs me some CPU memory, but it is more reliable than storing local files.
Update (11.06.2020)
I have still not found a different approach that leads to fewer CUDA initializations while maintaining the same processing speed. From what I've read and come to understand, PyTorch does not infer too much with how CUDA is operating, and leaves that up to NVIDIA.
I have ended up using a pool of custom, device-specific processes, called Workers, that is maintained by my custom pool class (more about this above). In addition, I let each of these Workers take in one or more checkpoints as well as the function that processes them (training, testing, hp optimization) via a Queue. These checkpoints are then processed simultaneously via a python multiprocessing ThreadPool in each Worker and the results are then returned one by one via the return Queue the moment they are ready.
This gives me the parallel procedure I was needing, but the memory issue is still there. Due to time constraints, I have come to terms with it for now.

Extracting dictionary from TensorFlow's built in history

I'm in the process of getting my feet wet with tensorflow. I've started and successfully run the MNIST classifier with layers tutorial on my computer, now my objective is to play around with the parameters of the tutorial program (step size, layer properties). To do this, I want to collect the data on each run of the convolutional neural network and see if I can learn something from the changes of the network's output based on the changes of the network's design.
At the end of each run of the program (CNN MNIST Classifier) tensorflow returns numerous lines labeling what the classifier is doing. This one caught my eye:
INFO:tensorflow:Saving dict for global step 161: accuracy = 0.1663,
global_step = 161, loss = 2.286773
Now, I can copy/screenshot this line every time I want to record my run, but I'd like to figure out how to access the dictionary where this data is being collected.
I've tried find tensorflow in my bash, this wasn't very helpful.
My question is:
How would I find the run history for this classifier? Can you give me any advice on how to record/access this information in the future?

How to train my neural network faster by running CPU and GPU in parallel

I'm trying to train a (pretty big) neural network using a GPU. The network is written in pytorch. I use python 3.6.3 running on ubuntu 16.04. Currently, the code is running, but it's taking about twice as long as it should to run because my data-grabbing process using the CPU is run in series to the training process using the GPU. Essentially, I grab a mini-batch from file using a mini-batch generator, send that mini-batch to the GPU and then train the network on that minibatch. I've timed the two processes (grabbing a mini batch and training on that mini batch), and they are similar in how long they take (both take around 200ms). I'd like to do something similar to keras' fit_generator method which runs the data-grabbing in parallel to the training (it creates a que of minibatches that can be sent to the GPU when the GPU wants to train on that mini batch). What is the best way to do that? For concreteness, my data generator code and training code run something like this (pseudocode):
#This generator opens a file, grabs and yields a mini batch
def data_gen(PATH,batch_size=32):
with h5py.File(PATH,'r') as f:
for mini-batch in mini-batches:
X = f['X'][mini-batch]
Y = f['Y'][mini-batch]
yield (X,Y)
for epoch in range(epochs):
for data in data_gen(PATH):
mini_X,mini_Y = data
mini_X = autograd.Variable(torch.Tensor(mini_X))
mini_Y = autograd.Variable(torch.Tensor(mini_Y))
out = net(mini_X)
loss = F.binary_cross_entropy(out,mini_Y)
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()
Something like that. As you can see, I use the data_gen as an actual generator for the for-loop, so it's being run sequentially with the training. I would like to run it in parallel and have it generate a que of minibatches which I can then feed to my network. Currently, it takes more than 5 hours to run one epoch, I think with a parallelized version of this, I could get that down to 3 hours or less. I looked into multiprocessing on python, but the explanation on the official documentation was a bit dense for me since I have only limited prior experience in parallel computing. If there's some resources I could take a look at, pointing me towards those resources would be very helpful too! Thanks.

You will need to use threads for the data generation. The idea is to let the CPU handle the data generation (usually loading) while your GPU does the training. That been said, it is not the CPU that will slow things down. It is the constant reading and writing of files. If you are using a dataset make sure the files are copied or extracted into contiguous blocks on your file system. If your files are defragmented across your hard drive, loading them will be a bottleneck regardless of the multi-threading mechanism you are using. With SSD hard drives it is not noticeable.

Asynchronous computation in TensorFlow

Recently I've been toying with TensorFlow and I mentioned that the framework is not able to use all my available computational resources. In Convolutional Neural Networks tutorial they mention that
Naively employing asynchronous updates of model parameters leads to sub-optimal training performance because an individual model replica might be trained on a stale copy of the model parameters. Conversely, employing fully synchronous updates will be as slow as the slowest model replica.
Although they mention it in both in the tutorial and in a whitepaper I did not really find a way to do the asynchronous parallel computation on a local machine. Is it even possible? Or is it part of the distributed to-be-released version of TensorFlow. If it is, then how?

Asynchronous gradient descent is supported in the open-source release of TensorFlow, without even modifying your graph. The easiest way to do it is to execute multiple concurrent steps in parallel:
loss = ...
# Any of the optimizer classes can be used here.
train_op = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.01).minimize(loss)
sess = tf.Session()
sess.run(tf.initialize_all_variables())
def train_function():
# TODO: Better termination condition, e.g. using a `max_steps` counter.
while True:
sess.run(train_op)
# Create multiple threads to run `train_function()` in parallel
train_threads = []
for _ in range(NUM_CONCURRENT_STEPS):
train_threads.append(threading.Thread(target=train_function))
# Start the threads, and block on their completion.
for t in train_threads:
t.start()
for t in train_threads:
t.join()
This example sets up NUM_CONCURRENT_STEPS calls to sess.run(train_op). Since there is no coordination between these threads, they proceed asynchronously.
It's actually more challenging to achieve synchronous parallel training (at present), because this requires additional coordination to ensure that all replicas read the same version of the parameters, and that all of their updates become visible at the same time. The multi-GPU example for CIFAR-10 training performs synchronous updates by making multiple copies of the "tower" in the training graph with shared parameters, and explicitly averaging the gradients across the towers before applying the update.
N.B. The code in this answer places all computation on the same device, which will not be optimal if you have multiple GPUs in your machine. If you want to use all of your GPUs, follow the example of the multi-GPU CIFAR-10 model, and create multiple "towers" with their operations pinned to each GPU. The code would look roughly as follows:
train_ops = []
for i in range(NUM_GPUS):
with tf.device("/gpu:%d" % i):
# Define a tower on GPU `i`.
loss = ...
train_ops.append(tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.01).minimize(loss))
def train_function(train_op):
# TODO: Better termination condition, e.g. using a `max_steps` counter.
while True:
sess.run(train_op)
# Create multiple threads to run `train_function()` in parallel
train_threads = []
for train_op in train_ops:
train_threads.append(threading.Thread(target=train_function, args=(train_op,))
# Start the threads, and block on their completion.
for t in train_threads:
t.start()
for t in train_threads:
t.join()
Note that you might find it convenient to use a "variable scope" to facilitate variable sharing between the towers.