rapidsai / raft

RAFT contains fundamental widely-used algorithms and primitives for machine learning and information retrieval. The algorithms are CUDA-accelerated and form building blocks for more easily writing high performance applications.
https://docs.rapids.ai/api/raft/stable/
Apache License 2.0
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Scaling workspace resources #2322

Closed achirkin closed 1 month ago

achirkin commented 1 month ago

Brief

Add another workspace memory resource that does not have the explicit memory limit. That is, after the change we have the following:

  1. rmm::mr::get_current_device_resource() is default for all allocations, as before. It is used for the allocations with unlimited lifetime, e.g. returned to the user.
  2. raft::get_workspace_resource() is for temporary allocations and forced to have fixed size, as before. However, it becomes smaller and should be used only for allocations, which do not scale with problem size. It defaults to a thin layer on top of the current_device_resource.
  3. raft::get_large_workspace_resource() (new) is for temporary allocations, which can scale with the problem size. Unlike workspace_resource, its size is not fixed. By default, it points to the current_device_resource, but the user can set it to something backed by the host memory (e.g. managed memory) to avoid OOM exceptions when there's not enough device memory left.

Problem

We have a list of issues/preference/requirements, some of which contradict others

  1. We rely on RMM to handle all allocations and we often use rmm::mr::pool_memory_resource for performance reasons (to avoid lots of cudaMalloc calls in the loops)
  2. Historically, we've used managed memory allocators as a workaround to avoid OOM errors or improve speed (by increasing batch sizes).
  3. However, the design goal is to avoid setting allocators on our own and to give the full control to the user (hence the workaround in 2 was removed).
  4. We introduced the workspace resource earlier to allow querying the available memory reliably and maximize the batch sizes accordingly (see also issue #1310). Without this, some of our batched algorithms either fail with OOM or severely underperform due to small batch sizes.
  5. However, we cannot just put all of RAFT temporary allocations into the limited workspace_resource, because some of them scale with the problem size and would inevitably fail with OOM at some point.
  6. Setting the workspace resource to the managed memory is not advisable as well for performance reasons: we have lots of small allocations in performance critical sections, so we need a pool, but a pool in the managed memory inevitably outgrows the device memory and makes the whole program slow.

Solution

I propose to split the workspace memory into two:

  1. small, fixed-size workspace for small, frequent allocations
  2. large workspace for the allocations that scale with the problem size

Notes:

cjnolet commented 1 month ago

/merge