Tensorflow and Multiprocessing: Passing Sessions

Question

I have recently been working on a project that uses a neural network for virtual robot control. I used tensorflow to code it up and it runs smoothly. So far, I used sequenti

Answer 1

I use keras as a wrapper with tensorflow as a backed, but the same general principal should apply.

If you try something like this:

import keras
from functools import partial
from multiprocessing import Pool

def ModelFunc(i,SomeData):
    YourModel = Here
    return(ModelScore)

pool = Pool(processes = 4)
for i,Score in enumerate(pool.imap(partial(ModelFunc,SomeData),range(4))):
    print(Score)

It will fail. However, if you try something like this:

from functools import partial
from multiprocessing import Pool

def ModelFunc(i,SomeData):
    import keras
    YourModel = Here
    return(ModelScore)

pool = Pool(processes = 4)
for i,Score in enumerate(pool.imap(partial(ModelFunc,SomeData),range(4))):
    print(Score)

It should work. Try calling tensorflow separately for each process.

Answer 2

You can't use Python multiprocessing to pass a TensorFlow Session into a multiprocessing.Pool in the straightfoward way because the Session object can't be pickled (it's fundamentally not serializable because it may manage GPU memory and state like that).

I'd suggest parallelizing the code using actors, which are essentially the parallel computing analog of "objects" and use used to manage state in the distributed setting.

Ray is a good framework for doing this. You can define a Python class which manages the TensorFlow Session and exposes a method for running your simulation.

import ray
import tensorflow as tf

ray.init()

@ray.remote
class Simulator(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.sess = tf.Session()
        self.simple_model = tf.constant([1.0])

    def simulate(self):
        return self.sess.run(self.simple_model)

# Create two actors.
simulators = [Simulator.remote() for _ in range(2)]

# Run two simulations in parallel.
results = ray.get([s.simulate.remote() for s in simulators])

Here are a few more examples of parallelizing TensorFlow with Ray.

See the Ray documentation. Note that I'm one of the Ray developers.