Vizier HyperParameter Tuning Jobs Terminated by Service - google-cloud-platform

I am running a Vizier HyperParameter Tuning job on the GCP AI Platform and trials keep getting interrupted with the error: Terminated by service. If the job is supposed to continue running, it will be restarted on other VM shortly.
I am using a STANDARD_P100 GPU and it seems like the individual tuning trials are getting booted (pre-empted) from the GPU in the middle of training -- some trials complete successfully and some trials get stopped around 1000 or 2000 steps -- these are always happening on the 1000 which is significant because I am doing evaluation every 1000 steps so something seems to be happening when switching between training and evaluation that is allowing these jobs to get pre-empted. The next trial starts up and then typically runs for 1000 steps again (rather than restarting the previous trial).
Is there anything that I can do so that my trials will complete successfully? They never get re-started as the VM says and it seems like it makes the entire hyperparameter tuning worthless because ~90% of the trials are never completed and the ones that fail likely give bad information to the vizier optimization algorithm. These runs can be quite expensive to run on GPUs and they are essentially worthless as currently configured even though I am being charged for trials that don't ever complete.
An example of my hptuning_config is below...
scaleTier: CUSTOM
masterType: standard_v100
hyperparameters:
goal: MAXIMIZE
hyperparameterMetricTag: 'accuracy'
maxTrials: 80
maxParallelTrials: 1
enableTrialEarlyStopping: TRUE
params: ...

I got the same problem. I suspect it's because of the enableTrialEarlyStopping
https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/docs/using-hyperparameter-tuning#stopping_trials_early
You have to set:
enableTrialEarlyStopping: False

Related

Too many fetch failures when running Terasort

I have a 8 node Hadoop cluster, where each node has 24 physical cores with Hyper-threading, thus, 48 vCPUs and 256GB memory.
I am trying to run a 6TB Terasort job.
Problem: Terasort runs with no errors when I use yarn.nodemanager.resource.cpu-vcores=44 (48 minus 4 for OS, DN, RM, etc.). However, when I try to over-subscribe the CPUs with yarn.nodemanager.resource.cpu-vcores=88, I get several map and reduce errors.
All map failures are like "Too many fetch failures....".
All reduce erros are like "....#Block does not have enough number of replicas....".
I have seen THIS and THIS links. I have checked my /etc/hosts files and also bumped my net.core.somaxconn kernel parameter.
I don't understand why do I get map and reduce failures with over-subscribed CPUs.
Any hints or recommendations would be helpful, and thanks in advance.
I got to the bottom of the “Too many fetch…” error. What was happening was that because the servers were heavily loaded when running my 7TB job (remember that 1TB jobs always ran successfully), there were not enough connections happening between the master and the slaves. I needed to increase the listen queue between the master and the slave, which can be done by modifying a kernel parameter called “somaxconn”.
By default, “somaxconn” is set to to 128 in the rhel OS. By bumping it to 1024, the 7TB terasort job ran successfully with no failures.
Hope this helps someone.

Elastic Beanstalk high CPU load after a week of running

I am running a single-instance worker on AWS Beanstalk. It is a single-container Docker that runs some processes once every business day. Mostly, the processes sync a large number of small files from S3 and analyze those.
The setup runs fine for about a week, and then CPU load starts growing linearly in time, as in this screenshot.
The CPU load stays at a considerable level, slowing down my scheduled processes. At the same time, my top-resource tracking running inside the container (privileged Docker mode to enable it):
echo "%CPU %MEM ARGS $(date)" && ps -e -o pcpu,pmem,args --sort=pcpu | cut -d" " -f1-5 | tail
shows nearly no CPU load (which changes only during the time that my daily process runs, seemingly accurately reflecting system load at those times).
What am I missing here in terms of the origin of this "background" system load? Wondering if anybody seen some similar behavior, and/or could suggest additional diagnostics from inside the running container.
So far I have been re-starting the setup every week to remove the "background" load, but that is sub-optimal since the first run after each restart has to collect over 1 million small files from S3 (while subsequent daily runs add only a few thousand files per day).
The profile is a bit odd. Especially that it is a linear growth. Almost like something is accumulating and taking progressively longer to process.
I don't have enough information to point at a specific issue. A few things that you could check:
Are you collecting files anywhere, whether intentionally or in a cache or transfer folder? It could be that the system is running background processes (AV, index, defrag, dedupe, etc) and the "large number of small files" are accumulating to become something that needs to be paged or handled inefficiently.
Does any part of your process use a weekly naming convention or house keeping process. Might you be getting conflicts, or accumulating work load as the week rolls over. i.e. the 2nd week is actually processing both the 1st & 2nd week data, but never completing so that the next day it is progressively worse. I saw something similar where an inappropriate bubble sort process was not completing (never reached the completion condition due to the slow but steady inflow of data causing it to constantly reset) and the demand by the process got progressively higher as the array got larger.
Do you have some logging on a weekly rollover cycle ?
Are there any other key performance metrics following the trend ? (network, disk IO, memory, paging, etc)
Do consider if it is a false positive. if it is high CPU there should be other metrics mirroring the CPU behaviour, cache use, disk IO, S3 transfer statistics/logging.
RL

How to make TensorFlow use more available CPU

How can I fully utilize each of my EC2 cores?
I'm using a c4.4xlarge AWS Ubuntu EC2 instance and TensorFlow to build a large convoluted neural network. nproc says that my EC2 instance has 16 cores. When I run my convnet training code, the top utility says that I'm only using 400% CPU. I was expecting it to use 1600% CPU because of the 16 cores. The AWS EC2 monitoring tab confirms that I'm only using 25% of my CPU capacity. This is a huge network, and on my new Mac Pro it consumes about 600% CPU and takes a few hours to build, so I don't think the reason is because my network is too small.
I believe the line below ultimately determines CPU usage:
sess = tf.InteractiveSession(config=tf.ConfigProto())
I admit I don't fully understand the relationship between threads and cores, but I tried increasing the number of cores. It had the same effect as the line above: still 400% CPU.
NUM_THREADS = 16
sess = tf.InteractiveSession(config=tf.ConfigProto(intra_op_parallelism_threads=NUM_THREADS))
EDIT:
htop shows that shows that I am actually using all 16 of my EC2 cores, but each core is only at about 25%
top shows that my total CPU % is around 400%, but occasionally it will shoot up to 1300% and then almost immediately go back down to ~400%. This makes me think there could be a deadlock problem
Several things you can try:
Increase the number of threads
You already tried changing the intra_op_parallelism_threads. Depending on your network it can also make sense to increase the inter_op_parallelism_threads. From the doc:
inter_op_parallelism_threads:
Nodes that perform blocking operations are enqueued on a pool of
inter_op_parallelism_threads available in each process. 0 means the
system picks an appropriate number.
intra_op_parallelism_threads:
The execution of an individual op (for
some op types) can be parallelized on a pool of
intra_op_parallelism_threads. 0 means the system picks an appropriate
number.
(Side note: The values from the configuration file referenced above are not the actual default values tensorflow uses but just example values. You can see the actual default configuration by manually inspecting the object returned by tf.ConfigProto().)
Tensorflow uses 0 for the above options meaning it tries to choose appropriate values itself. I don't think tensorflow picked poor values that caused your problem but you can try out different values for the above option to be on the safe side.
Extract traces to see how well your code parallelizes
Have a look at
tensorflow code optimization strategy
It gives you something like this. In this picture you can see that the actual computation happens on far fewer threads than available. This could also be the case for your network. I marked potential synchronization points. There you can see that all threads are active for a short moment which potentially is the reason for the sporadic peaks in CPU utilization that you experience.
Miscellaneous
Make sure you are not running out of memory (htop)
Make sure you are not doing a lot of I/O or something similar

How to use .. QNX Momentics Application Profiler?

I'd like to profile my (multi-threaded) application in terms of timing. Certain threads are supposed to be re-activated frequently, i.e. a thread executes its main job once every fixed time interval. In other words, there's a fixed time slice in which all the threads a getting re-activated.
More precisely, I expect certain threads to get activated every 2ms (since this is the cycle period). I made some simplified measurements which confirmed the 2ms to be indeed effective.
For the purpose of profiling my app more accurately it seemed suitable to use Momentics' tool "Application Profiler".
However when I do so, I fail to interpret the timing figures that I selected. I would be interested in the average as well in the min and max time it takes before a certain thread is re-activated. So far it seems, the idea is to be only able to monitor the times certain functions occupy. However, even that does not really seem to be the case. E.g. I've got 2 lines of code that are put literally next to each other:
if (var1 && var2 && var3) var5=1; takes 1ms (avg)
if (var4) var5=0; takes 5ms (avg)
What is that supposed to tell me?
Another thing confuses me - the parent thread "takes" up 33ms on avg, 2ms on max and 1ms on min. Aside the fact that the avg shouldn't be bigger than max (i.e. even more I expect avg to be not bigger than 2ms - since this is the cycle time), it's actually increasing the longer I run the the profiling tool. So, if I would run the tool for half an hour the 33ms would actually be something like 120s. So, it seems that avg is actually the total amount of time the thread occupies the CPU.
If that is the case, I would assume to be able to offset against the total time using the count figure which doesn't work either. Mostly due to the figure being almost never available - i.e. there is only as a separate list entry (for every parent thread) called which does not represent a specific process scope.
So, I read QNX community wiki about the "Application Profiler", incl. the manual about "New IDE Application Profiler Enhancements", as well as the official manual articles about how to use the profiler tool.. but I couldn't figure out how I would use the tool to serve my interest.
Bottom line: I'm pretty sure I'm misinterpreting and misusing the tool for what it was intended to be used. Thus my question - how would I interpret the numbers or use the tool's feedback properly to get my 2ms cycle time confirmed?
Additional information
CPU: single core
QNX SDP 6.5 / Momentics 4.7.0
Profiling Method: Sampling and Call Count Instrumentation
Profiling Scope: Single Application
I enabled "Build for Profiling (Sampling and Call Count Instrumentation)" in the Build Options1
The System Profiler should give you what you are looking for. It hooks into the micro kernel and lets you see the state of all threads on the system. I used it in a similar setup to find out what our system was getting unexpected time-outs. (The cause turned out to be Page Waits on critical threads.)

Locust.io: Controlling the request per second parameter

I have been trying to load test my API server using Locust.io on EC2 compute optimized instances. It provides an easy-to-configure option for setting the consecutive request wait time and number of concurrent users. In theory, rps = wait time X #_users. However while testing, this rule breaks down for very low thresholds of #_users (in my experiment, around 1200 users). The variables hatch_rate, #_of_slaves, including in a distributed test setting had little to no effect on the rps.
Experiment info
The test has been done on a C3.4x AWS EC2 compute node (AMI image) with 16 vCPUs, with General SSD and 30GB RAM. During the test, CPU utilization peaked at 60% max (depends on the hatch rate - which controls the concurrent processes spawned), on an average staying under 30%.
Locust.io
setup: uses pyzmq, and setup with each vCPU core as a slave. Single POST request setup with request body ~ 20 bytes, and response body ~ 25 bytes. Request failure rate: < 1%, with mean response time being 6ms.
variables: Time between consecutive requests set to 450ms (min:100ms and max: 1000ms), hatch rate at a comfy 30 per sec, and RPS measured by varying #_users.
The RPS follows the equation as predicted for upto 1000 users. Increasing #_users after that has diminishing returns with a cap reached at roughly 1200 users. #_users here isn't the independent variable, changing the wait time affects the RPS as well. However, changing the experiment setup to 32 cores instance (c3.8x instance) or 56 cores (in a distributed setup) doesn't affect the RPS at all.
So really, what is the way to control the RPS? Is there something obvious I am missing here?
(one of the Locust authors here)
First, why do you want to control the RPS? One of the core ideas behind Locust is to describe user behavior and let that generate load (requests in your case). The question Locust is designed to answer is: How many concurrent users can my application support?
I know it is tempting to go after a certain RPS number and sometimes I "cheat" as well by striving for an arbitrary RPS number.
But to answer your question, are you sure your Locusts doesn't end up in a dead lock? As in, they complete a certain number of requests and then become idle because they have no other task to perform? Hard to tell what's happening without seeing the test code.
Distributed mode is recommended for larger production setups and most real-world load tests I've run have been on multiple but smaller instances. But it shouldn't matter if you are not maxing out the CPU. Are you sure you are not saturating a single CPU core? Not sure what OS you are running but if Linux, what is your load value?
While there is no direct way of controlling rps, you can try constant_pacing and constant_throughput option in wait_time
From docs
https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/api.html#locust.wait_time.constant_throughput
In the following example the task will always be executed once every 1 seconds, no matter the task execution time:
class MyUser(User):
wait_time = constant_throughput(1)
constant_pacing is inverse of this.
So if you run with 100 concurrent users, test will run at 100rps (assuming each request takes less than 1 second in first place