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Eliminate dummy batches and init_cuda_buffer. #3732

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Jun 21, 2021
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stephenroller
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Patch description
Eliminate the dreaded _dummy_batch and _init_cuda_buffer.

Users have complained about the presence of these methods. When debugging, the first batch being a dummy causes some confusion (why am I getting gibberish data?) and the manual implementation of a _dummy_batch is annoying (why is my model breaking on the first pass?)

Adopt Fairseq's newer approach:

  • Cache the very first batch we ever seen. If it's invalid, we should be raising an exception anyway. If it's valid, it will be good enough
  • Do NOT initialize the cuda buffer. Just keep that batch around
  • If we need to recover from an OOM, used the cached dummy batch as the data.

Testing steps
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@klshuster klshuster left a comment

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thanks for making this change. I'm approving but did have one perhaps pertinent question

Cache a batch to be used as a dummy during _fake_forward_pass.
"""
if not hasattr(self, '_dummy_batch'):
self._dummy_batch = batch
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does this unnecessarily use up memory? what if the first batch is huge for example?

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Could be a worse problem for images. For text, imagine it's a 2x2048x1024 LongTensor (2x for content and label; bs 2048; string length 1024). A long is 8 bytes. So we'll be wasting 32MiB of memory.

@stephenroller stephenroller merged commit 36a63c7 into master Jun 21, 2021
@stephenroller stephenroller deleted the noinitcuda branch June 21, 2021 22:21
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3 participants