TensorFlow and Python multiprocessing - tensorflow

I wrote the following piece of code to evaluate the effect of Python multiprocessing while using TensorFlow:
import tensorflow as tf
from multiprocessing import Process
mydevice = "/gpu:0"
gpu_options = tf.GPUOptions(per_process_gpu_memory_fraction=0.01)
mrange = 1000
def myfun():
with tf.device(mydevice):
mm1 = tf.constant([[float(i) for i in range(mrange)]],dtype='float32')
mm2 = tf.constant([[float(i)] for i in range(mrange)],dtype='float32')
with tf.device(mydevice):
prod = tf.matmul(mm1,mm2)
sess = tf.Session(config=tf.ConfigProto(log_device_placement=True,gpu_options=gpu_options))
rest = sess.run(prod)
print rest
sess.close()
ll = []
for i in range(100):
p1 = Process(target=myfun)
p1.start()
ll.append(p1)
for item in ll:
item.join()
Time taken to run this code on my laptop's GPU: ~6 seconds
If I change the device to CPU: ~6 seconds
If I remove multiprocessing, and call the function serially: 75 seconds
Could someone please explain what exactly would be happening if I use multiprocessing while the device is set to GPU. It is clear that multiple CUDA kernels will be launched, but will they be running concurrently in the GPU?
This is just an experiment to see if I can launch multiple RNNs onto the GPU.

GPUs are mainly designed to render 2D and 3D computer graphics. This involves a lot of number crunching which can benefit from parallel algorithms. Deep learning also involves a lot of parallel number crunching so that the same hardware which accelerates graphics can also accelerate deep learning.
What makes a GPU different from a CPU is that it is optimized for highly parallel number crunching. Look at the specs for any Nvidia GPU and you will see a metric called CUDA Cores. This number is usually somewhere in the thousands range (or hundreds for weaker GPUs). A single CUDA core is a lot weaker than a standard CPU core but since you have so many a GPU can greatly out perform a CPU for parallel tasks. The architecture is actually pretty complex which you can read about if you get into CUDA programming. Take a look at this article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units
From the numbers you posted I am guessing you have a weak laptop GPU so that is why it performs about the same as the CPU. On my desktop I have the new GTX 1080 and it can beat my CPU by more than 20x. I am surprised that your numbers go up so much when you call it in serial but I think there is something else going on there since I am not even sure how you would do that with tensorflow.

Fermi and later GPUs support concurrent kernel execution via CUDA streams, which is used by TensorFlow. Therefore, independent ops will run in parallel even if they are in the same graph, launched by a single sess.run call on a single thread, as long as the CUDA runtime thinks it is beneficial to do so.

Related

How to run tensorflow inference for multiple models on GPU in parallel?

Do you know any elegant way to do inference on 2 python processes with 1 GPU tensorflow?
Suppose I have 2 processes, first one is classifying cats/dogs, 2nd one is classifying birds/planes, each process is running different tensorflow model and run on GPU. These 2 models will be given images from different cameras continuously.
Usually, tensorflow will occupy all memory of the entire GPU. So when you start another process, it will crash saying OUT OF MEMORY or failed convolution CUDA or something along that line.
Is there a tutorial/article/sample code that shows how to load 2 models in different processes and both run in parallel?
This is very useful also in case you are running a model inference while you are doing some heavy graphics e.g. playing games. I also want to know how running the model affects the game.
I've tried using python Thread and it works but each model predicts 2 times slower (and you know that python thread is not utilizing multiple CPU cores). I want to use python Process but it's not working. If you have sample few lines of code that work I would appreciate that very much.
I've attached current Thread code also:
As summarized here, you can specify the proportion of GPU memory allocated per process.
gpu_options = tf.GPUOptions(per_process_gpu_memory_fraction=0.333)
sess = tf.Session(config=tf.ConfigProto(gpu_options=gpu_options))
Using Keras, it may be simpler to allow 'memory growth' which will expand the allocated memory on demand as described here.
import tensorflow as tf
gpus = tf.config.experimental.list_physical_devices('GPU')
if gpus:
try:
for gpu in gpus:
tf.config.experimental.set_memory_growth(gpu, True)
except RuntimeError as e:
print(e)
The following should work for Tensorflow 2.0:
from tensorflow.compat.v1 import ConfigProto
from tensorflow.compat.v1 import InteractiveSession
config = ConfigProto()
config.gpu_options.per_process_gpu_memory_fraction = 0.2
config.gpu_options.allow_growth = True
session = InteractiveSession(config=config)
Apart from setting gpu memory fraction, you need to enable MPS in CUDA to get better speed if you are running more than one model on GPU simultaneoulsy. Otherwise, inference speed will be slower as compared to single model running on GPU.
sudo nvidia-smi -i 0 -c EXCLUSIVE_PROCESS
sudo nvidia-cuda-mps-control -d
Here 0 is your GPU number
After finishing stop the MPS daemon
echo quit | sudo nvidia-cuda-mps-control
OK. I think I've found the solution now.
I use tensorflow 2 and there are essentially 2 methods to manage the memory usage of GPU.
set memory growth to true
set memory limit to some number
You can use both methods, ignore all the warning messages about out of memory stuff. I still don't know what it exactly means but the model is still running and that's what I care about.
I measured the exact time the model uses to run and it's a lot better than running on CPU. If I run both processes at the same time, the speed drop a bit, but it's still lot better than running on CPU.
For memory growth approach, my GPU is 3GB so first process try to allocate everything and then 2nd process said out of memory. But it still works.
For memory limit approach, I set the limit to some number e.g. 1024 MB. Both processes work.
So What is the right minimum number that you can set?
I tried reducing the memory limit until I found that my model works with 64 MB limit fine. The prediction speed is still the same as when I set the memory limit to 1024 MB. When I set the memory limit to 32MB, I noticed 50% speed drop. When I set to 16 MB, the model refuses to run because it does not have enough memory to store the image tensor.
This means that my model requires minimum of 64 MB which is very little considering that I have 3GB to spare. This also allows me to run the model while playing some video games.
Conclusion: I chose to use the memory limit approach with 64 MB limit. You can check how to use memory limit here: https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/gpu
I suggest you to try changing the memory limit to see the minimum you need for your model. You will see speed drop or model refusing to run when the memory is not enough.

Low NVIDIA GPU Usage with Keras and Tensorflow

I'm running a CNN with keras-gpu and tensorflow-gpu with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti on Windows 10. My computer has a Intel Xeon e5-2683 v4 CPU (2.1 GHz). I'm running my code through Jupyter (most recent Anaconda distribution). The output in the command terminal shows that the GPU is being utilized, however the script I'm running takes longer than I expect to train/test on the data and when I open the task manager it looks like the GPU utilization is very low. Here's an image:
Note that the CPU isn't being utilized and nothing else on the task manager suggests anything is being fully utilized. I don't have an ethernet connection and am connected to Wifi (don't think this effects anything but I'm not sure with Jupyter since it runs through the web broswers). I'm training on a lot of data (~128GB) which is all loaded into the RAM (512GB). The model I'm running is a fully convolutional neural network (basically a U-Net architecture) with 566,290 trainable parameters. Things I tried so far:
1. Increasing batch size from 20 to 10,000 (increases GPU usage from ~3-4% to ~6-7%, greatly decreases training time as expected).
2. Setting use_multiprocessing to True and increasing number of workers in model.fit (no effect).
I followed the installation steps on this website: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/The-Best-Way-to-Install-TensorFlow-with-GPU-Support-on-Windows-10-Without-Installing-CUDA-1187/#look-at-the-job-run-with-tensorboard
Note that this installation specifically DOESN'T install CuDNN or CUDA. I've had trouble in the past with getting tensorflow-gpu running with CUDA (although I haven't tried in over 2 years so maybe it's easier with the latest versions) which is why I used this installation method.
Is this most likely the reason why the GPU isn't being fully utilized (no CuDNN/CUDA)? Does it have something to do with the dedicated GPU memory usage being a bottleneck? Or maybe something to do with the network architecture I'm using (number of parameters, etc.)?
Please let me know if you need any more information about my system or the code/data I'm running on to help diagnose. Thanks in advance!
EDIT: I noticed something interesting in the task manager. An epoch with batch size of 10,000 takes around 200s. For the last ~5s of each epoch, the GPU usage increases to ~15-17% (up from ~6-7% for the first 195s of each epoch). Not sure if this helps or indicates there's a bottleneck somewhere besides the GPU.
You for sure need to install CUDA/Cudnn to fully utilize GPU with tensorflow. You can double check that the packages are installed correctly and if the GPU is available to tensorflow/keras by using
import tensorflow as tf
tf.config.list_physical_devices("GPU")
and the output should look something like [PhysicalDevice(name='/physical_device:GPU:0', device_type='GPU')]
if the device is available.
If you've installed CUDA/Cudnn correctly then all you need to do is change copy --> cuda in the dropdown menu in the task manager which will show the number of active cuda cores. The other indicators for the GPU will not be active when running tf/keras because there is no video encoding/decoding etc to be done; it is simply using the cuda cores on the GPU so the only way to track GPU usage is to look at the cuda utilization (when considering monitoring from the task manager)
I would first start by running one of the short "tests" to ensure Tensorflow is utilizing the GPU. For example, I prefer #Salvador Dali's answer in that linked question
import tensorflow as tf
with tf.device('/gpu:0'):
a = tf.constant([1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0], shape=[2, 3], name='a')
b = tf.constant([1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0], shape=[3, 2], name='b')
c = tf.matmul(a, b)
with tf.Session() as sess:
print (sess.run(c))
If Tensorflow is indeed using your GPU you should see the result of the matrix multplication printed. Otherwise a fairly long stack trace stating that "gpu:0" cannot be found.
If this all works well that I would recommend utilizing Nvidia's smi.exe utility. It is available on both Windows and Linux and AFAIK installs with the Nvidia driver. On a windows system it is located at
C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI\nvidia-smi.exe
Open a windows command prompt and navigate to that directory. Then run
nvidia-smi.exe -l 3
This will show you a screen like so, that updates every three seconds.
Here we can see various information about the state of the GPUs and what they are doing. Of specific interest in this case is the "Pwr: Usage/Cap" and "Volatile GPU-Util" columns. If your model is indeed using the/a GPU these columns should increase "instantaneously" once you start training the model.
You most likely will see an increase in fan speed and temperature unless you have a very nice cooling solution. In the bottom of the printout you should also see a Process with a name akin to "python" or "Jupityr" running.
If this fails to provide an answers as to the slow training times than I would surmise the issue lies with the model and code itself. And I think its is actually the case here. Specifically viewing the Windows Task Managers listing for "Dedicated GPU Memory Usage" pinged at basically maximum.
If you have tried #KDecker's and #OverLordGoldDragon's solution, low GPU usage is still there, I would suggest first investigating your data pipeline. The following two figures are from tensorflow official guides data performance, they are well illustrated how data pipeline will affect the GPU efficiency.
As you can see, prepare data in parallel with the training will increase the GPU usage. In this situation, CPU processing is becoming the bottleneck. You need to find a mechanism to hide the latency of preprocessing, such as changing the number of processes, size of butter etc. The efficiency of CPU should match the efficiency of the GPU. In this way, the GPU will be maximally utilized.
Take a look at Tensorpack, and it has detailed tutorials of how to speed up your input data pipeline.
Everything works as expected; your dedicated memory usage is nearly maxed, and neither TensorFlow nor CUDA can use shared memory -- see this answer.
If your GPU runs OOM, the only remedy is to get a GPU with more dedicated memory, or decrease model size, or use below script to prevent TensorFlow from assigning redundant resources to the GPU (which it does tend to do):
## LIMIT GPU USAGE
config = tf.ConfigProto()
config.gpu_options.allow_growth = True # don't pre-allocate memory; allocate as-needed
config.gpu_options.per_process_gpu_memory_fraction = 0.95 # limit memory to be allocated
K.tensorflow_backend.set_session(tf.Session(config=config)) # create sess w/ above settings
The unusual increased usage you observe may be shared memory resources being temporarily accessed due to exhausting other available resources, especially with use_multiprocessing=True - but unsure, could be other causes
There seems to have been a change to the installation method you referenced : https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/The-Best-Way-to-Install-TensorFlow-with-GPU-Support-on-Windows-10-Without-Installing-CUDA-1187
It is now much easier and should eliminate the problems you are experiencing.
Important Edit You don't seem to be looking at the actual compute of the GPU, look at the attached image:
read following two pages ,u will get idea to properly setup with GPU
https://medium.com/#kegui/how-do-i-know-i-am-running-keras-model-on-gpu-a9cdcc24f986
https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/41956/how-to-make-my-neural-netwok-run-on-gpu-instead-of-cpu

Training on multi-GPUs with a small batch size

I am running TensorFlow on a machine which has two GPUs, each with 3 GB memory. My batch size is only 2GB, and so can fit on one GPU. Is there any point in training with both GPUs (using CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES)? If I did, how would TensorFlow distribute the training?
With regards to memory: I assume that you mean that one data batch is 2GB. However, Tensorflow also requires memory to store variables as well as hidden layer results etc. (to compute gradients). For this reason it also depends on your specific model whether or not the memory will be enough. Your best bet would be to just try with one GPU and see if the program crashes due to memory errors.
With regards to distribution: Tensorflow doesn't do this automatically at all. Each op is placed on some device. By default, if you have any number of GPUs available, all GPU-compatible ops will be placed on the first GPU and the rest on the CPU. This is despite Tensorflow reserving all memory on all GPUs by default.
You should have a look at the GPU guide on the Tensorflow website. The most important thing is that you can use the with tf.device context manager to place ops on other GPUs. Using this, the idea would be to split your batch into X chunks (X = number of GPUs) and define your model on each device, each time taking the respective chunk as input and making sure to reuse variables.
If you are using tf.Estimator, there is some information in this question. It is very easy to do distributed execution here using just two simple wrappers, but I personally haven't been able to use it successfully (pretty slow and crashes randomly with a segfault).

Strategies for improving performance when using Tensorflow w / C++?

I'm fairly new to Tensorflow in and ML in general and am wondering what strategies I can use to increase performance of an application I am building.
My app is using the Tensorflow C++ interface, with a source compiled TF 0.11 libtensorflow_cc.so (built with bazel build -c opt --copt=-mavx and optionally adding --config=cuda) for either AVX or AVX + CUDA on Mac OS X 10.12.1, on an MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 (2 cores 8 threads) with 16GB ram and a Nvidia 750m w/ 2GB VRam)
My application is using Inception V3 model and pulling feature vectors from pool_3 layer. I'm decoding video frames via native API's and passing those in memory buffers to the C++ interface for TF and running them into a session.
I'm not currently batching, but I am caching my session and re-using it for each individual decoded frame / tensor submission. Ive noticed that both CPU and GPU performance is about the same, taking about 40 to 50 seconds to process 222 frames, which seems very slow to me. Ive confirmed CUDA is being invoked, loaded, and the GPU is functioning (or appears so).
Some questions:
In general what should I expect for reasonable performance time wise of TF doing a frame of Inception on a consumer laptop?
How much of a difference does batching make for these operations? For tensors of 1x299x299x3 , I imagine I am doing more PCI transfer waiting than waiting on for meaningful work from the GPU?
if so Is there a good example of batching under C++ for InceptionV3?
Is there operations that cause additional CPU->GPU Syncronization that might otherwise be avoided?
Is there a way to ensure my sessions / graphs share resources ? Can I use nested scopes somehow in this manner? I couldn't quite get that to work but likely missed something.
Any good documentation of general strategies for things to do / avoid?
My code is below:
https://github.com/Synopsis/Synopsis/blob/TensorFlow/Synopsis/TensorFlowAnalyzer/TensorFlowAnalyzer.mm
Thank you very much
For reference, OpenCV analysis using perceptual hash, histogram, dense optical flow, sparse optical flow for point tracking, and simple saliency detection takes 4 to 5 seconds for the same 222 frames using CPU or CPU + OpenCL.
https://github.com/Synopsis/Synopsis/tree/TensorFlow/Synopsis/StandardAnalyzer
Answering your last question first, if there's documentation about performance optimization, yes:
The TensorFlow Performance Guide
The TensorFlow GPU profiling hints
Laptop performance is highly variable, and TF isn't particularly optimized for laptop GPUs. The numbers you're getting (222 frames in 40-50 seconds) ~= 5 fps don't seem crazy on a laptop platform, using the 2016 version of TensorFlow, with inception. With some of the performance improvements outlined in the performance guide above, that should probably be doubled in late 2017.
For batching, yes - the newer example inception model code allows a variable batch size at inference time. This is mostly about whether the model itself was defined to handle a batch size, which is something improved since 2016.
Batching for inference will make a pretty big difference on GPU. Whether it helps on CPU depends a lot -- for example, if you build with MKL-DNN support, batching should be considered mandatory, but basic TensorFlow may not benefit as much.

Tensorflow 0.6 GPU Issue

I am using Nvidia Digits Box with GPU (Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X) and Tensorflow 0.6 to train the Neural Network, and everything works. However, when I check the Volatile GPU Util using nvidia-smi -l 1, I notice that it's only 6%, and I think most of the computation is on CPU, since I notice that the process which runs Tensorflow has about 90% CPU usage. The result is the training process is very slow. I wonder if there are ways to make full usage of GPU instead of CPU to speed up the training process. Thanks!
I suspect you have a bottleneck somewhere (like in this github issue) -- you have some operation which doesn't have GPU implementation, so it's placed on CPU, and the GPU is idling because of data transfers. For instance, until recently reduce_mean was not implemented on GPU, and before that Rank was not implemented on GPU, and it was implicitly being used by many ops.
At one point, I saw a network from fully_connected_preloaded.py being slow because there was a Rank op that got placed on CPU, and hence triggering the transfer of entire dataset from GPU to CPU at each step.
To solve this I would first recommend upgrading to 0.8 since it had a few more ops implemented for GPU (reduce_prod for integer inputs, reduce_mean and others).
Then you can create your session with log_device_placement=True and see if there are any ops placed on CPU or GPU that would cause excessive transfers per step.
There are often ops in the input pipeline (such as parse_example) which don't have GPU implementations, I find it helpful sometimes to pin the whole input pipeline to CPU using with tf.device("/cpu:0"): block