Ian’s Blog

Category: til

Today I Learned, and other useful tips

  • CUDA graphs in PyTorch

    The kernel dispatch time eats a lot of performance on GPU – CUDA graphs let you chain a bunch of kernels together, and they’re now more accessible from PyTorch:

    CUDA Graphs, which made its debut in CUDA 10, let a series of CUDA kernels to be defined and encapsulated as a single unit, i.e., a graph of operations, rather than a sequence of individually-launched operations. It provides a mechanism to launch multiple GPU operations through a single CPU operation, and hence reduces the launching overheads.

    https://pytorch.org/blog/accelerating-pytorch-with-cuda-graphs/

  • Rich Sutton’s Bitter Lesson

    Saw this referenced a few times, and hadn’t read it before. Short, and worthwhile.

    We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.