1. Execution on the Theta supercomputer#

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to use DeepHyper on the Theta supercomputer at the ALCF. Theta is a Cray XC40, 11.7 petaflops system based on Intel® Xeon Phi processor. It is composed of:

  1. Login nodes thetalogin*

  2. Head nodes thetamom*

  3. Compute nodes nid*

When logging in Theta you are located on a login node. From this node you can set up your environment such as downloading your data or installing the software you will use for your experimentations. Then, you will setup an experiment using DeepHyper and finally submit an allocation request with the qsub command line to execute your code on the compute nodes. Once the allocation starts you will be located on a head node from which you can access compute nodes using MPI (e.g., with the aprun command line) or using SSH. However, using SSH requires a specific arguments to be present in your allocation request otherwise it will be blocked by the system.

When using DeepHyper, one can use two different strategies to distribute the computation of evaluations on the supercomputer:

  1. N-evaluation per 1-node: many evaluations can be launched in parallel but each of them only uses the ressources of at most one node (e.g., one neural network training per node).

  2. 1-evaluation per N-node: many evaluations can be launched in parallel and each of them can use the ressources of multiple nodes.

1.1. Submission Script#

1.1.1. N-evaluation per 1-node#

In this strategy, N-evaluations can be launched per available compute node. Therefore, each evaluation uses the ressources of at most one node. For example, you can train one neural network per node, or two neural networks per node. In this case, we will (1) start by launching a Ray cluster accross all available compute nodes, then we will (2) execute the search on one of them and send tasks to previously instanciated workers.

Let us start by defining a toy hyperparameter search. Create a script named myscript.py and add the following content in it:

from deephyper.problem import HpProblem

# define the run-function to evaluation a given hyperparameter configuration
# here we simply want to maximise a polynomial function
def run(config: dict):
    return -config["x"]**2

# define the variable(s) you want to optimize
problem = HpProblem()
problem.add_hyperparameter((-10.0, 10.0), "x")

Then, it is required to define a shell script which will initialize the environment of each compute node. One way to initialize your environment could be to use the ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile which are called at the beginning of each session. However, if you want to have different installations depending on your experimentations it is preferable to avoid activating globally each installation but instead activate them only when necessary. To that end, we will create the init-dh-environment.sh script which will be called to initialize each compute node:

$ touch init-dh-environment.sh && chmod +x init-dh-environment.sh

Once created and executable you can add the following content in it (e.g. vim init-dh-environment.sh) and do not forget to adapt the $PROJECT_NAME with your project’s allocation:

file: init-dh-environment.sh#
#!/bin/bash

export TF_CPP_MIN_LOG_LEVEL=3
export TF_XLA_FLAGS=--tf_xla_enable_xla_devices

module load miniconda-3

# Activate installed conda environment with DeepHyper
conda activate $PATH_TO_CONDA_WITH_DEEPHYPER

# We had the directory where "myscript.py" is located to be able
# to access it during the search
export PYTHONPATH=$MYSCRIPT_DIR:$PYTHONPATH

Adapt the two variables $PATH_TO_CONDA_WITH_DEEPHYPER and $MYSCRIPT_DIR. Once the init-dh-environment.sh is created we need to define a submission script. The goal of this script is to (1) request a given amount of ressources, (2) launch a Ray cluster accross all compute nodes, (3) execute a DeepHyper task which distribute the computation on the Ray workers. Create a folder exp/ where to store your experiments. Then create a script named deephyper-job.qsub:

$ mkdir exp && cd exp/
$ touch deephyper-job.qsub && chmod +x deephyper-job.qsub

Then add the following content to deephyper-job.qsub:

#!/bin/bash
#COBALT -A $PROJECT_NAME
#COBALT -n 2
#COBALT -q debug-flat-quad
#COBALT -t 60
#COBALT --attrs enable_ssh=1

# User Configuration
EXP_DIR=$PWD
INIT_SCRIPT=$PWD/../init-dh-environment.sh
CPUS_PER_NODE=2

# Initialize environment
source $INIT_SCRIPT

# Getting the node names
nodes_array=($(python -m deephyper.core.cli._nodelist theta $COBALT_PARTNAME | grep -P '\[.*\]' | tr -d '[],'))

head_node=${nodes_array[0]}
head_node_ip=$(eval "getent hosts $head_node"| awk {'print $1'})

# Starting the Ray Head Node
port=6379
ip_head=$head_node_ip:$port
export ip_head
echo "IP Head: $ip_head"

echo "Starting HEAD at $head_node"
ssh -tt $head_node_ip "source $INIT_SCRIPT; cd $EXP_DIR; \
    ray start --head --node-ip-address=$head_node_ip --port=$port \
    --num-cpus $CPUS_PER_NODE --block" &

# optional, though may be useful in certain versions of Ray < 1.0.
sleep 10

# number of nodes other than the head node
worker_num=$((${#nodes_array[*]} - 1))
echo "$worker_num workers"

for ((i = 1; i <= worker_num; i++)); do
    node_i=${nodes_array[$i]}
    node_i_ip=$(eval "getent hosts $node_i"| awk {'print $1'})
    echo "Starting WORKER $i at $node_i with ip=$node_i_ip"
    ssh -tt $node_i_ip "source $INIT_SCRIPT; cd $EXP_DIR; \
        ray start --address $ip_head \
        --num-cpus $CPUS_PER_NODE --block" &
    sleep 5
done

# Execute the DeepHyper Task
# Here the task is an hyperparameter search using the DeepHyper CLI
# However it is also possible to call a Python script using different
# Features from DeepHyper (see following notes)
ssh -tt $head_node_ip "source $INIT_SCRIPT && cd $EXP_DIR && \
    deephyper hps ambs \
    --problem myscript.problem \
    --evaluator ray \
    --run-function myscript.run \
    --ray-address auto \
    --ray-num-cpus-per-task 1"

Warning

The #COBALT --attrs enable_ssh=1 is crucial otherwise ssh calls will be blocked by the system.

Don’t forget to adapt the COBALT variables to your needs:

#COBALT -A $PROJECT_NAME
#COBALT -n 2
#COBALT -q debug-flat-quad
#COBALT -t 60

Tip

The different #COBALT arguments can also be passed through the command line:

qsub -n 2 -q debug-flat-quad -t 60 -A $PROJECT_NAME \
    --attrs enable_ssh=1 \
    deephyper-job.qsub

1.1.2. 1-evaluation per N-node#

Important

Section under construction!

The Ray workers are launch on the head node this time. This will allow us to use MPI inside our run-function.

file: deephyper-job.qsub#
#!/bin/bash
#COBALT -A datascience
#COBALT -n 2
#COBALT -q debug-flat-quad
#COBALT -t 30

# Initialize the head node
EXP_DIR=$PWD
INIT_SCRIPT=$PWD/SetUpEnv.sh
source $INIT_SCRIPT

# Start Ray workers on the head node
for port in $(seq 6379 9000); do
    RAY_PORT=$port;
    ray start --head --num-cpus 2 --port $RAY_PORT;
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        break
    fi
done

# Execute the DeepHyper Task
python myscript.py

In this case the run function can call MPI routines:

import os

def run(config):

    os.system("aprun -n .. -N ..")

    return parse_result()