Habitat: A Runtime-Based Computational Performance Predictor for Deep Neural Network Training

Habitat is a tool that predicts a deep neural network's training iteration execution time on a given GPU. It currently supports PyTorch. To learn more about how Habitat works, please see our research paper.

Running From Source

Currently, the only way to run Habitat is to build it from source. You should use the Docker image provided in this repository to make sure that you can compile the code.

1. Download the Habitat pre-trained models.
2. Run extract-models.sh under analyzer to extract and install the pre-trained models.
3. Run setup.sh under docker/ to build the Habitat container image.
4. Run start.sh to start a new container. By default, your home directory will be mounted inside the container under ~/home.
5. Once inside the container, run install-dev.sh under analyzer/ to build and install the Habitat package.
6. In your scripts, import habitat to get access to Habitat. See experiments/run_experiment.py for an example showing how to use Habitat.

Note: Habitat needs access to your GPU's performance counters, which requires special permissions if you are running with a recent driver (418.43 or later). If you encounter a CUPTI_ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_PRIVILEGES error when running Habitat, please follow the instructions here and in issue #5.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license (see LICENSE and NOTICE), with the exception of the files mentioned below.

This software contains source code provided by NVIDIA Corporation. These files are:

• The code under cpp/external/cupti_profilerhost_util/ (CUPTI sample code)
• cpp/src/cuda/cuda_occupancy.h

The code mentioned above is licensed under the NVIDIA Software Development Kit End User License Agreement.

We include the implementations of several deep neural networks under experiments/ for our evaluation. These implementations are copyrighted by their original authors and carry their original licenses. Please see the corresponding README files and license files inside the subdirectories for more information.

Research Paper

Habitat began as a research project in the EcoSystem Group at the University of Toronto. The accompanying research paper will appear in the proceedings of USENIX ATC'21. If you are interested, you can read a preprint of the paper here.

If you use Habitat in your research, please consider citing our paper:

@inproceedings{habitat-yu21,
  author = {Yu, Geoffrey X. and Gao, Yubo and Golikov, Pavel and Pekhimenko,
    Gennady},
  title = {{Habitat: A Runtime-Based Computational Performance Predictor for
    Deep Neural Network Training}},
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
    (USENIX ATC'21)}},
  year = {2021},
}