Using GPU slows down the training process

I tried to play around with the tutorial example as follows, if I run it on CPU (use_cuda = False) the elapsed time is rough 53s but It takes 153s running on GPU (use_cuda = True), so what’s wrong with my implementation? Thanks.

pyro version 0.1.2
pytorch version 0.3

import torch
from torch.autograd import Variable
import pyro
import pyro.distributions as dist
import pyro.optim as optim
import pyro.infer as infer
import time

pyro.clear_param_store() 

data = []
for _ in range(60):
    data.append(1)
for _ in range(4):
    data.append(0)

use_cuda = False

if use_cuda == True:
    data = Variable(torch.Tensor(data)).view(-1, 1).cuda()
else:
    data = Variable(torch.Tensor(data)).view(-1, 1)    

def model(data):
    α = Variable(torch.Tensor([10.0])).type_as(data)
    β = Variable(torch.Tensor([10.0])).type_as(data)
    # prior distribution
    θ = pyro.sample("θ", dist.beta, α, β)
    # generating observations
    with pyro.iarange("observed data", use_cuda=use_cuda):
        pyro.sample("obs", dist.bernoulli, θ, obs=data)

def guide(data):
    log_α = Variable(torch.Tensor([2.7]), requires_grad=True)
    log_β = Variable(torch.Tensor([2.7]), requires_grad=True)
    
    log_α = pyro.param("log alpha", log_α).type_as(data)
    log_β = pyro.param("log beta", log_β).type_as(data)

    α, β = torch.exp(log_α), torch.exp(log_β)
    pyro.sample("θ", dist.beta, α, β)

adam_params = {"lr": 0.001}
optimizer = optim.Adam(adam_params)

svi = infer.SVI(model, guide, optimizer, loss="ELBO", num_particles=5)

tic = time.time()
n_steps = 4000
for step in range(n_steps):
    loss = svi.step(data)
    if step % 100 == 0:
        print("loss = {}".format(loss))
print("time passed {}".format(time.time()-tic))

α = torch.exp(pyro.param("log alpha")).data.numpy()[0] 
β = torch.exp(pyro.param("log beta")).data.numpy()[0]
print(α, β)
print(α / (α + β))

this is expected behavior. there is no guarantee that code run on gpus is faster than code run on the cpu. in this case you have very small tensors and so the all the overhead associated with moving data/instructions to the gpu far outweight any gains made from fast floating point arithmetic.

1 Like

Hi @martinjankowiak, thanks for your reply. The batch size 64 is indeed small but there are 4000 iterations computation and I think all tensors are only created once, there are not so many tensor moving operations between cpu and gpu.

Hi @xiucheng,

I believe the slowdown is due to the pyro.distributions.beta sampler in the guide. Our current beta implementation makes a round-trip to CPU and simply uses scipy under the hood (code). We’re working with the PyTorch team to implement faster CPU and GPU implementations of all distributions in the PyTorch 0.4 release.

Hi @fritzo, very happy to know about that and looking forward to the new release coming!