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Benchmarking of Cudnn convolutions is bugged when Tensor Cores are used.
The CUDNN function cudnnFindConvolutionForwardAlgorithmEx
(used in https://github.com/zdevito/ATen/blob/master/aten/src/ATen/native/cudnn/Conv.cpp#L481) searches an optimal algorithm satisfying the provided workspace constraint by varying the algorithm type but also by changing the math type. The current ATen code fixes the math type to CUDNN_TENSOR_OP_MATH
if fp16 is used (see https://github.com/zdevito/ATen/blob/master/aten/src/ATen/cudnn/Descriptors.h#L199) irrespective of the math type of the optimal algorithm returned by cudnnFindConvolutionForwardAlgorithmEx
. The worst consequence of this oversight is that the workspace that gets allocated under the wrong math type assumption violates the actual memory constraint estimated with getMaxWorkspaceSize
, resulting in a CUDA Out Of Memory
.
To solve this issue one should consider caching the cudnnConvolutionFwdAlgoPerf_t
structures rather than cudnnConvolutionFwdAlgo_t
. In this way the information about the correct math type
is available and can be properly set before computing the actual workspace and before running the convolution.
The issue does not affect only the forward pass, but also eventually BwdData
and BwdFilter
.