Low GPU usage by Keras / Tensorflow?

Question

I\'m using keras with tensorflow backend on a computer with a nvidia Tesla K20c GPU. (CUDA 8)

I\'m tranining a relatively simple Convolutional Neural Network, during tra

Answer 1

The reason may be that your network is "relatively simple". I had a MNIST network with 60k training examples.

• with 100 neurons in 1 hidden layer, CPU training was faster and GPU utilization on GPU training was around 10%

• with 2 hidden layers, 2000 neurons each, GPU was significantly faster(24s vs 452s on CPU) and its utilization was around 39%

I have a pretty old PC (24GB DDR3-1333, i7 3770k) but a modern graphic card(RTX 2070 + SSDs if that matters) so there is a memory-GPU data transfer bottleneck.

I'm not yet sure how much room for improvement is here. I'd have to train a bigger network and compare it with better CPU/memory configuration + same GPU.

I guess that for smaller networks it doesn't matter that much anyway because they are relatively easy for the CPU.