CalcGraph: taming the high costs of deep learning using models

Abstract

Models based on differential programming, like deep neural networks, are well established in research and able to outperform manually coded counterparts in many applications. Today, there is a rising interest to introduce this flexible modeling to solve real-world problems. A major challenge when moving from research to application is the strict constraints on computational resources (memory and time). It is difficult to determine and contain the resource requirements of differential models, especially during the early training and hyperparameter exploration stages. In this article, we address this challenge by introducing CalcGraph, a model abstraction of differentiable programming layers. CalcGraph allows to model the computational resources that should be used and then CalcGraph’s model interpreter can automatically schedule the execution respecting the specifications made. We propose a novel way to efficiently switch models from storage to preallocated memory zones and vice versa to maximize the number of model executions given the available resources. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach by showing that it consumes less resources than state-of-the-art frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch for single-model and multi-model execution.