Correct way to run distributed training in ML Engine - tensorflow

Im trying to train my model (that is not build with tf.estimator or tf.keras) using distributed training job in ML Engine.
What steps should i take in order to run distributed training job in ML Engine?
I found following guidelines:
provide --scale-tier parameter, from step-by-step guide
use distributed strategy API in the code, from recent google io talks
So if former provided in the command line does it mean i don't need to do anything with latter because ML Engine somehow takes care of distributing my graph across devices? Or do i need to do both?
And also what happens if i manually specify devices using:
with tf.device('/gpu:0/1/2/etc')
..and then run the command with --scale-tier?

There are two possible scenarios:
- You want to use machines with CPU:
In this case, you are right. Using --scale-tier parameter is enough to have a job that is distributed automatically in ML Engine.
You have several scale-tier options {1}.
- You want to use machines with GPU:
In this case, you have to define a config.yaml file that describes the GPU options you want and run a gcloud command to launch the ML Engine job with config.yaml as a parameter {2}.
If you use with tf.device('/gpu:0/1/2/etc') inside your code, you are forcing the use of that device and it overwrites the normal behavior. {3}.
{1}: https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/reference/rest/v1/projects.jobs#scaletier
{2}: https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/docs/tensorflow/using-gpus#requesting_gpu-enabled_machines
{3}: https://www.tensorflow.org/programmers_guide/using_gpu

Related

ML model serving with great developer ergonomics

We are looking for ML model serving with a developer experience where the ML engineers don’t need to know Devops.
Ideally we are looking for the following ergonomics or something similar:
Initialize a new model serving end point preferably by a CLI, get a GCS bucket
each time we train a new model, we put it in the GCS bucket of step 1.
The serving system guarantees that the most recent model in the bucket is served unless a model is specified by version number.
We are also looking for a service that optimizes cost and latency.
Any suggestions?
Have you considered https://www.tensorflow.org/tfx/serving/architecture? You can definitely automate the entire workflow using tfx. I think the guide here does a good job walking through it. Depending on your use-case, you may want to use tft instead of Kubeflow like they're doing in that guide. Besides serving automation, you may also want to consider pipeline automation to separate the feature engineering from the pipeline mechanics itself. For example, you can build the pipeline, abstract out the feature engineering into a tensorflow function meeting certain requirements, and automate the deployment process also. This way you don't need to deal with the feature specs/schemas manually, and you know that your transformations are the same during serving as they were while training.
You can do the same thing with scikit-learn also, and I believe serving scikit-learn models is also supported under the vertex-ai umbrella.
To your point about latency, you definitely want the pipeline doing the transformations on the gpu, as such, I would recommend using tensorflow over something like scikit-learn if the use-case is truly time sensitive.
Best of luck!

How to access Spark DataFrame data in GPU from ML Libraries such as PyTorch or Tensorflow

Currently I am studying the usage of Apache Spark 3.0 with Rapids GPU Acceleration. In the official spark-rapids docs I came across this page which states:
There are cases where you may want to get access to the raw data on the GPU, preferably without copying it. One use case for this is exporting the data to an ML framework after doing feature extraction.
To me this sounds as if one could make data that is already available on the GPU from some upstream Spark ETL process directly available to a framework such as Tensorflow or PyTorch. If this is the case how can I access the data from within any of these frameworks? If I am misunderstanding something here, what is the quote exactly referring to?
The link you references really only allows you to get access to the data still sitting on the GPU, but using that data in another framework, like Tensorflow or PyTorch is not that simple.
TL;DR; Unless you have a library explicitly setup to work with the RAPIDS accelerator you probably want to run your ETL with RAPIDS, then save it, and launch a new job to train your models using that data.
There are still a number of issues that you would need to solve. We have worked on these in the case of XGBoost, but it has not been something that we have tried to tackle for Tensorflow or PyTorch yet.
The big issues are
Getting the data to the correct process. Even if the data is on the GPU, because of security, it is tied to a given user process. PyTorch and Tensorflow generally run as python processes and not in the same JVM that Spark is running in. This means that the data has to be sent to the other process. There are several ways to do this, but it is non-trivial to try and do it as a zero-copy operation.
The format of the data is not what Tensorflow or PyTorch want. The data for RAPIDs is in an arrow compatible format. Tensorflow and PyTorch have APIs for importing data in standard formats from the CPU, but it might take a bit of work to get the data into a format that the frameworks want and to find an API to let you pull it in directly from the GPU.
Sharing GPU resources. Spark only recently added in support for scheduling GPUs. Prior to that people would just launch a single spark task per executor and a single python process so that the python process would own the entire GPU when doing training or inference. With the RAPIDS accelerator the GPU is not free any more and you need a way to share the resources. RMM provides some of this if both libraries are updated to use it and they are in the same process, but in the case of Pytorch and and Tensoflow they are typically in python processes so figuring out how to share the GPU is hard.

Distributing DCGAN with horovod on Sagemaker

I am trying to distribute my workload to multiple GPUs with AWS Sagemaker. I am using a custom algorithm for a DCGAN with tensorflow 2.0. The code thus far works perfect on a single GPU. I decided to implement the same code but with horovod distribution across multiple GPUs to reduce run time. The code, when changed from the original to horovod, seems to work the same, and the training time is roughly the same. However, when I print out hvd.size() I am only getting a size of 1, regardless of the multiple GPU's present. Tensorflow recognizes all the present GPU's; Horovod, no.
I've tried running my code on both Sagemaker and on an EC2 instance in a docker container, and in both environments the same issue persists.
Here is the a link to my github repo:
Here
I've also tried using a different neural network entirely from the horovod repository, updated to tf2.0:
hvdmnist
At this point I am only trying to get the GPU's within one instance to be utilized, and am not trying utilize multiple instances.
I think I might be missing a dependency of some sort in the docker image, either that or there is some sort of prerequisite command for me to run. I don't really know.
Thanks.

Simplest way to distribute Tensorflow training on premise?

What is the simplest way to train tensorflow models (using Estimator API) distributed across a home network? Doesn't look like ml-engine local train allows you to specify IPs.
Your best bet is to use something like Kubernetes. This is a work in progress, but I believe it does have support for distributed training as well -- https://github.com/tensorflow/k8s.
Alternatively for more low-tech automation options, these come to mind...
You could have a script which still uses SSH and executes a script remotely.
You could have the individual workers poll a shared location for a file to use as a signal to download and execute a script.
You can set the environment variable TF_CONFIG, which will be parsed by estimators.

Already implemented neural network on Google Cloud Platform

I have implemented a neural network model using Python and Tensorflow, which normally runs on my own computer.
Now I would like to train it on new datasets on the Google Cloud Platform. Do you think it is possible? Do I need to change my code?
Thank you very much for your help!
Google Cloud offers the Cloud ML Engine service, which allows to train your models and perform predictions without the need of running and maintaining an instance with the required software.
In order to run the TensorFlow NN models you already have, you will not need to change your code, you will only have to package the trainer appropriately, as described in the documentation, and run a ML Engine job that performs the training itself. Once you have your model, you can also deploy it in the same service and later get predictions with different features depending on your requirements (urgency in getting the predictions, data set sources, etc.).
Alternatively, as suggested in the comments, you can always launch a Compute Engine instance and run there your TensorFlow model as if you were doing it locally in your computer. However, I would strongly recommend the approach I proposed earlier, as you will be saving some money, because you will only be charged for your usage (training jobs and/or predictions) and do not need to configure an instance from scratch.