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GPU Open Analytics Initiative

gpuopenanalytics.com

84 pointsjonbaer24 comments

Let me get this straight: H2O's contribution to this project is a bunch of deep-learning libraries that they didn't create? How will they maintain and extend that? Do they know how credibility in open-source works?

H2O wrote its random forests and GBMs, neither of which show large performance gains on GPUs compared to neural nets. And the neural nets in this initiative were created by Google, Berkeley, Microsoft... This looks like the OpenStack of machine learning, an unmaintainable project that will crumble under its own complexity.

I really don't understand your arguments, let alone the overt negative tone here?

>> 1. How will they maintain and extend that?

Umm just like how everyone else does it.

>> 2. H2O wrote its random forests and GBMs, neither of which show large performance gains on GPUs compared to neural nets.

What does your statement even means? [1]

>> And the neural nets in this initiative were created by Google, Berkeley, Microsoft...

You mean libraries?

Note: NOT an employee of H2O or anyway affiliated.

[1] https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/bidmach-machine-l...

I'm negative on marketing fluff. You're free to enjoy it of course.

>> Umm just like how everyone else does it.

Wrong. Their ability to maintain and extend any of those libraries is limited. TensorFlow is hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Google can maintain and extend just fine. I doubt that H2O has the chops. That matters to their clients, because TensorFlow breaks things with new releases, and those clients will want someone to fix it. Do you call H2O? Do they patch Google into the conference line? I'm saying they're not in a position to offer commercial support. Anyone who has worked in enterprise will see the risks here.

>> What does your statement even means?

The algorithms that H2O specializes in do not benefit that much from the massively parallel computation that GPUs offer. If you don't understand the differences in the computation required by neural nets as opposed to random forests, you will not understand my critique. Neural nets offer superior accuracy on many problem sets and often need GPUs. Random forests do neither of those things.

H2O, for most of its long existence, has operated purely on CPUs just fine. But GPUs and deep learning are hot, so they are associating themselves with the buzzwords, even though they are not really in a position to a) build deep learning solutions or b) make their real product perform well on GPUs. Marketing fluff.

>> You mean libraries?

Why yes, I mean libraries. Thanks for clearing that up.

There's a lot of noise in the deep learning and AI space. Watson is one egregious example. H2O is another. While the technology itself is promising, some of the vendors are dubious.

In the end, most AI/DL implementations in products are fluff. It feels like a lot of products are about "HEY LOOK AT ME, I CAN DO IT TOO!", which screams immaturity of the concepts.

From personal experience, many customers ask about our capabilities - but when it actually comes to using any of them there are only a handful of actually relevant ML algorithms that are useful, and those used to be called 'statistics' up until fairly recently.

I wish you had actually looked through the website and the associated Github repo. H2O has actually ported their machine learning algorithms starting with GLM & GBM to run on GPUs and achieved some pretty significant performance gains by doing so. https://github.com/h2oai/perf

I wish you knew the history of H2O's attempts to make a decent product. H2O, the open-source project, was largely created by H2O the company's technical co-founder, Cliff Click, who was forced out of the company more than a year ago for internal political reasons.

With him, H2O lost much of its ability to develop and extend its code base, particularly since Cliff built many things in house that might have better been dependencies. That's why Steam never happened. Now H2O is mostly marketing, an overfunded startup in slow decline that was forced to fire its sales team last year because, well, nobody wants their stuff.

https://venturebeat.com/2016/09/24/machine-learning-startup-...

H2O is not nearly as fast as SMILE by most metrics:

http://haifengl.github.io/smile/ https://github.com/haifengl/smile

But what I'm saying is that true gains are seen for algorithms that require more parallelization than H2O's specialties. It's a critique of the relative improvements.

I was hoping this was going to be about replacing CUDA or fostering the development of clover, pocl or other OpenCL implementations. Not sure how open your analytics can be when it's all overwhelmingly dependent on binary blobs.

Is there any documentation regarding how this allocates / deallocates GPU Memory. While developing Deep Video Analytics [1] one of the biggest issue I have faced is TensorFlow refusing to deallocate GPU memory [2] (freeing up for other processes to use) unless the process is killed/exits. This in combination with allow-growth allocation strategy used by TF makes it unpredictable to run mixed loads. E.g. I would prefer to run a Detector, Indexer along with some computation in a GPU data frame etc. at same time on a single GPU.

[1] https://github.com/AKSHAYUBHAT/DeepVideoAnalytics/

[2] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/1578

Funny I was reading about that yesterday, here is a snippet that might help you if you do not need all memory in one process:

  options = tf.GPUOptions(per_process_gpu_memory_fraction=0.5)

  session = tf.Session(config=tf.ConfigProto(gpu_options=options))

That way you limit how much the GPU can use up front and then other applications can use it instead.

Of course if you need all of the memory during one phase of the computation, want to free it and then re-allocate it at a later stage you are probably out of luck.

But if your pipeline would normally allow for all tasks to run with limited memory you might get away with this strategy at the expense of some speed.

Good luck!

I use per_process_gpu_memory_fraction extensively [1], but when you are writing code that runs on different GPUs (Titan vs 1080 vs 1070 vs K80) due to change in the total memory available you run risk of under allocating or over allocating GPU memory.

[1] https://github.com/AKSHAYUBHAT/DeepVideoAnalytics/blob/maste...

Ah yes, I get your problem now, you have to deal with changing environments, not just your own setup to solve a particular problem. I see. That makes it a lot more complicated. Is there a way to fold the pipeline into a single process?

Not pretty from a modularity point of view but it just might get the job done.

I am using Celery workers which run a single tensorflow model in solo concurrency mode. The current workaround is to keep track of per process gpu fraction and then incorporate information about Total GPU memory available when assigning workers/celery process to individual GPUs.

Right, so essentially you are doing per process memory management because the layers lower down aren't smart enough to handle this transparently. I'm fairly sure that the nvidia libraries do support releasing memory and from what I see on my own machine memory usage of the GPU does go up and down when running longer jobs. So maybe it isn't so much a structural problem as a problem in one particular module that you exercise a lot?

For more context Timothy Prickett Morgan of Next Platform wrote about the Initiative a few days ago: https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/05/09/goai-keeping-databas... .

Internal work filter kills the link. Is the website on a blackhole list somewhere?

You're not missing much, just some introduction text and a link to their GitHub here: https://github.com/gpuopenanalytics

Here's the full website text:

GPU Open Analytics Initiative

Continuum Analytics, H2O.ai, and MapD Technologies have announced the formation of the GPU Open Analytics Initiative (GOAI) to create common data frameworks enabling developers and statistical researchers to accelerate data science on GPUs. GOAI will foster the development of a data science ecosystem on GPUs by allowing resident applications to interchange data seamlessly and efficiently.

GPU Data Frame

Architecture

Our first project: an open source GPU Data Frame with a corresponding Python API. The GPU Data Frame is a common API that enables efficient interchange of data between processes running on the GPU. End-to-end computation on the GPU avoids transfers back to the CPU or copying of in-memory data reducing compute time and cost for high-performance analytics common in artificial intelligence workloads. Users of the MapD Core database can output the results of a SQL query into the GPU Data Frame, which then can be manipulated by the Continuum Analytics’ Anaconda NumPy-like Python API or used as input into the H2O suite of machine learning algorithms without additional data manipulation.

Plus a list of founders: Anaconda, H2O.ai and MAPD.

Mine, too. For me it was too new of a registration.

Our team at Graphistry is involved on bringing this to the world of event & graph analytics, and to full-stack interactive visual analytics, so happy to answer questions about that!

Does GPU has full access to DRAM ? Or is it a 2-level access - DRAM then GPU RAM ?

Hello - Interesting to think this through! The GPU has its own bus and I think sends data to its cores according to the CUDA instructions that it is given.

I'm hazy about how instructions get to the GPU... I guess the cpu us is executing the OS and the then gets instructions to load the program from disk and then into the execution space in the GPU's memory. I think that the CPU then pushes data into the GPU's memory space for execution and reads results out from the GPU memory according to synchronisation instructions in its program?

What is data size (how many GB) that needs such frameworks?

Anything from 10GB to 1TB works well with these systems. They can scale beyond 1TB if you use multiple machines.

The catch is GPU memory is more expensive than CPU memory. You only want to use it if: 1) Your workload is compute heavy - think machine learning OR 2) You care about speed i.e., you want queries to be interactive.

With these in-memory DBs, scaling beyond 1TB becomes prohibitively expensive for most companies.

Note that MapD is not fully in-memory. It can pull from CPU Memory and SSD as necessary. So its essentially as fast as the fastest disk-based database at its worst and likely two orders-of-magnitude or more faster in many common scenarios where certain subsets of the data are repeatedly queries (for example, BI workloads or when repeatedly pulling out subsets of a dataset to train a model)

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