PyTorch Developer Podcast

The post-grad FX passes in Inductor run after AOTAutograd has functionalized and normalized the input program into separate forward/backward graphs. As such, they generally can assume that the graph in question is functionalized, except for some mutations to inputs at the end of the graph. At the end of post-grad passes, there are special passes that reintroduce mutation into the graph before going into the rest of Inductor lowering which is generally aware of passes. The post-grad FX passes are varied but are typically domain specific passes making local changes to specific parts of the graph.

CUDA graph trees are the internal implementation of CUDA graphs used in PT2 when you say mode="reduce-overhead". Their primary innovation is that they allow the reuse of memory across multiple CUDA graphs, as long as they form a tree structure of potential paths you can go down with the CUDA graph. This greatly reduced the memory usage of CUDA graphs in PT2. There are some operational implications to using CUDA graphs which are described in the podcast.

The min-cut partitioner makes decisions about what to save for backwards when splitting the forward and backwards graph from the joint graph traced by AOTAutograd. Crucially, it doesn't actually do a "split"; instead, it is deciding how much of the joint graph should be used for backwards. I also talk about the backward retracing problem.

AOTInductor is a feature in PyTorch that lets you export an inference model into a self-contained dynamic library, which can subsequently be loaded and used to run optimized inference. It is aimed primarily at CUDA and CPU inference applications, for situations when your model export once to be exported once while your runtime may still get continuous updates. One of the big underlying organizing principles is a limited ABI which does not include libtorch, which allows these libraries to stay stable over updates to the runtime. There are many export-like use cases you might be interested in using AOTInductor for, and some of the pieces should be useful, but AOTInductor does not necessarily solve them.

Tensor subclasses allow you to add extend PyTorch with new types of tensors without having to write any C++. They have been used to implement DTensor, FP8, Nested Jagged Tensor and Complex Tensor. Recent work by Brian Hirsh means that we can compile tensor subclasses in PT2, eliminating their overhead. The basic mechanism by which this compilation works is a desugaring process in AOTAutograd. There are some complications involving views, dynamic shapes and tangent metadata mismatch.

Compiled autograd is an extension to PT2 that permits compiling the entirety of a backward() call in PyTorch. This allows us to fuse accumulate grad nodes as well as trace through arbitrarily complicated Python backward hooks. Compiled autograd is an important part of our plans for compiled DDP/FSDP as well as for whole-graph compilation.

We discuss some extension points for customizing PT2 behavior across Dynamo, AOTAutograd and Inductor.

Define-by-run IR is how Inductor defines the internal compute of a pointwise/reduction operation. It is characterized by a function that calls a number of functions in the 'ops' namespace, where these ops can be overridden by different handlers depending on what kind of semantic analysis you need to do. The ops Inductor supports include regular arithmetic operators, but also memory load/store, indirect indexing, masking and collective operations like reductions.

Traditionally, unsigned integer support in PyTorch was not great; we only support uint8. Recently, we added support for uint16, uint32 and uint64. Bare bones functionality works, but I'm entreating the community to help us build out the rest. In particular, for most operations, we plan to use PT2 to build anything else. But if you have an eager kernel you really need, send us a PR and we'll put it in. While most of the implementation was straightforward, there are some weirdnesses related to type promotion inconsistencies with numpy and dealing with the upper range of uint64. There is also upcoming support for sub-byte dtypes uint1-7, and these will exclusively be implemented via PT2.

Inductor IR is an intermediate representation that lives between ATen FX graphs and the final Triton code generated by Inductor. It was designed to faithfully represent PyTorch semantics and accordingly models views, mutation and striding. When you write a lowering from ATen operators to Inductor IR, you get a TensorBox for each Tensor argument which contains a reference to the underlying IR (via StorageBox, and then a Buffer/ComputedBuffer) that says how the Tensor was computed. The inner computation is represented via define-by-run, which allows for compact definition of IR representation, while still allowing you to extract an FX graph out if you desire. Scheduling then takes buffers of inductor IR and decides what can be fused. Inductor IR may have too many nodes, this would be a good thing to refactor in the future.

I talk about VariableTracker in Dynamo. VariableTracker is Dynamo's representation of the Python. I talk about some recent changes, namely eager guards and mutable VT. I also tell you how to find the functionality you care about in VariableTracker (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XDPNK3iNNShg07jRXDOrMk2V_i66u1hEbPltcsxE-3E/edit#heading=h.i6v7gqw5byv6).

This podcast goes over the basics of unbacked SymInts. You might want to listen to this one before listening to https://pytorch-dev-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/zero-one-specialization Some questions we answer (h/t from Gregory Chanan): - Are unbacked symints only for export?  Because otherwise I could just break / wait for the actual size.  But maybe I can save some retracing / graph breaks perf if I have them too?  So the correct statement is "primarily" for export?- Why am I looking into the broadcasting code at all?  Naively, I would expect the export graph to be just a list of ATen ops strung together.  Why do I recurse that far down?  Why can't I annotate DONT_TRACE_ME_BRO?- How does 0/1 specialization fit into this?  I understand we may want to 0/1 specialize in a dynamic shape regime in "eager" mode (is there a better term?), but that doesn't seem to matter for export?- So far we've mainly been talking about how to handle our own library code.  There is a worry about pushing complicated constraints downstream, similar to torchscript.  What constraints does this actually push?

Mikey Dagistes joins me to ask some questions about the recent recent composability sync https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJV7YFbtoR4 where we discussed 0/1 specialization and its implications on export in PT2. What's the fuss all about? What do I need to understand about PT2 to understand why 0/1 specialization is a thing?

What is torchdynamo? From a bird's eye view, what exactly does it do? What are some important things to know about it? How does it differ from other graph capture mechanisms?For more reading, check out https://docs.google.com/document/d/13K03JN4gkbr40UMiW4nbZYtsw8NngQwrTRnL3knetGM/edit#

Soumith's keynote on PT2.0: https://youtu.be/vbtGZL7IrAw?t=1037PT2 Manifesto: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tlgPcR2YmC3PcQuYDPUORFmEaBPQEmo8dsh4eUjnlyI/edit# PT2 Architecture: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wpv8D2iwGkKjWyKof9gFdTf8ISszKbq1tsMVm-3hSuU/edit#

Join me with Richard Zou to talk about the history of functorch. What was the thought process behind the creation of functorch? How did it get started? JAX’s API and model is fairly different from PyTorch’s, how did we validate that it would work in PyTorch? Where did functorch go after the early user studies? Where is it going next?

What’s a learning rate? Why might you want to schedule it? How does the LR scheduler API in PyTorch work? What the heck is up with the formula implementation? Why is everything terrible?

What are they good for? (Caches. Private fields.) C++ side support, how it’s implemented / release resources. Python side support, how it’s implemented. Weak ref tensor hazard due to resurrection. Downsides of weak references in C++. Scott Wolchok’s release resources optimization.Other episodes to listen to first: https://pytorch-dev-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/reference-counting https://pytorch-dev-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/pyobject-preservation

Mike Ruberry has an RFC about stride-agnostic operator semantics (https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/78050), so let's talk about strides. What are they? How are they used to implement views and memory format? How do you handle them properly when writing kernels? In what sense are strides overspecified, and therefore, not worth slavishly reimplementing in a system like PrimTorch? What does Edward think we should do about them?My blog post that covers strides along with other topics can be found at http://blog.ezyang.com/2019/05/pytorch-internals/

AOTAutograd is a cool new feature in functorch for capturing both forward and backward traces of PyTorch operators, letting you run them through a compiler and then drop the compiled kernels back into a normal PyTorch eager program. Today, Horace joins me to tell me how it works, what it is good to use for, and what our future plans for it are.