PyTorch Developer Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Weak references Jun 06, 2022

Show notes

What are they good for? (Caches. Private fields.) C++ side support, how it’s implemented / release resources. Python side support, how it’s implemented. Weak ref tensor hazard due to resurrection. Downsides of weak references in C++. Scott Wolchok’s release resources optimization.

Other episodes to listen to first: https://pytorch-dev-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/reference-counting https://pytorch-dev-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/pyobject-preservation

Strides May 30, 2022

Show notes

Mike Ruberry has an RFC about stride-agnostic operator semantics (https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/78050), so let's talk about strides. What are they? How are they used to implement views and memory format? How do you handle them properly when writing kernels? In what sense are strides overspecified, and therefore, not worth slavishly reimplementing in a system like PrimTorch? What does Edward think we should do about them?

My blog post that covers strides along with other topics can be found at http://blog.ezyang.com/2019/05/pytorch-internals/

AOTAutograd May 09, 2022

Show notes

AOTAutograd is a cool new feature in functorch for capturing both forward and backward traces of PyTorch operators, letting you run them through a compiler and then drop the compiled kernels back into a normal PyTorch eager program. Today, Horace joins me to tell me how it works, what it is good to use for, and what our future plans for it are.

Dispatcher questions with Sherlock May 02, 2022

Show notes

Sherlock recently joined the PyTorch team, having previously worked on ONNX Runtime at Microsoft, and Sherlock’s going to ask me some questions about the dispatcher, and I’m going to answer them. We talked about the history of the dispatcher, how to override dispatching order, multiple dispatch, how to organize various dispatch keys and torch function mode. The companion video is at https://youtu.be/_qB2Ho1O3u4

New CI Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

PyTorch recently moved all of its CI from CircleCI to GitHub Actions. There were a lot of improvements in the process, making my old podcast about CI obsolete! Today, Eli Uriegas joins me to talk about why we moved to GitHub Actions, how the new CI system is put together, and what some cool features about our new CI.

Python exceptions Apr 17, 2022

Show notes

C++ has exceptions, Python has exceptions. But they’re not the same thing! How do exceptions work in CPython, how do we translate exceptions from C++ to Python (hint: it’s different for direct bindings versus pybind11), and what do warnings (which we also translate from C++ to Python) have in common with this infrastructure?

Torch vs ATen APIs Apr 11, 2022

Show notes

PyTorch’s torch API is the Python API everyone knows and loves, but there’s also another API, the ATen API, which most of PyTorch’s internal subsystems are built on. How to tell them apart? What implications do these have on our graph mode IR design? Also, a plug for PrimTorch, a new set of operators, not designed for eager mode, that is supposed to be even lower level than ATen.

All about NVIDIA GPUs Sep 24, 2021

Show notes

PyTorch is in the business of shipping numerical software that can run fast on your CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPU, but it turns out there is a lot of heterogeneity in NVIDIA’s physical GPU offering and when it comes to what is fast and what is slow, what specific GPU you have on hand matters quite a bit. Yet there are literally hundreds of distinct NVIDIA GPU models on the market, how do you make sense of the madness? Today, Natalia Gimelshein joins me to talk about everything that’s going on in the NVIDIA GPU market, and what, as a framework developer, you have to care about to make sense of it all.

Further reading.

NVIDIA microarchitectures on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nvidia_microarchitectures
A slightly old post about matching SM to architecture https://arnon.dk/matching-sm-architectures-arch-and-gencode-for-various-nvidia-cards/

Tensor subclasses and Liskov substitution principle Sep 16, 2021

Show notes

A lot of recent work going in PyTorch is all about adding new and interesting Tensor subclasses, and this all leads up to the question of, what exactly is OK to make a tensor subclass? One answer to this question comes from an old principle from Barbara Liskov called the Liskov substitution principle, which informally can be stated as S is a subtype of T if anywhere you have T, it can be replaced with S without altering "desirable" properties of this program. In this podcast I'll talk about LSP and how it relates to the design of Tensor subclasses and a hypothetical "abstract Tensor specification" which really doesn't exist but which sort of implicitly exists in the corpus of existing PyTorch programs.

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