Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
195 lines (136 loc) · 6.54 KB

gbdt.rst

File metadata and controls

195 lines (136 loc) · 6.54 KB
Raw

XGBoost / LightGBM User Guide

Ray Train has built-in support for XGBoost and LightGBM.

Basic Usage

Just as in the original xgboost.train() and lightgbm.train() functions, the training parameters are passed as the params dictionary.

XGBoost

Run pip install -U xgboost_ray.

doc_code/gbdt_user_guide.py

LightGBM

Run pip install -U lightgbm_ray.

doc_code/gbdt_user_guide.py

Ray-specific params are passed in through the trainer constructors.

How to scale out training?

The benefit of using Ray AIR is that you can seamlessly scale up your training by adjusting the ScalingConfig <ray.air.config.ScalingConfig>.

Note

Ray Train does not modify or otherwise alter the working of the underlying XGBoost / LightGBM distributed training algorithms. Ray only provides orchestration, data ingest and fault tolerance. For more information on GBDT distributed training, refer to XGBoost documentation and LightGBM documentation.

Here are some examples for common use-cases:

Multi-node CPU

Setup: 4 nodes with 8 CPUs each.

Use-case: To utilize all resources in multi-node training.

doc_code/gbdt_user_guide.py

Note that we pass 0 CPUs for the trainer resources, so that all resources can be allocated to the actual distributed training workers.

Single-node multi-GPU

Setup: 1 node with 8 CPUs and 4 GPUs.

Use-case: If you have a single node with multiple GPUs, you need to use distributed training to leverage all GPUs.

doc_code/gbdt_user_guide.py

Multi-node multi-GPU

Setup: 4 node with 8 CPUs and 4 GPUs each.

Use-case: If you have a multiple nodes with multiple GPUs, you need to schedule one worker per GPU.

doc_code/gbdt_user_guide.py

Note that you just have to adjust the number of workers - everything else will be handled by Ray automatically.

How many remote actors should I use?

This depends on your workload and your cluster setup. Generally there is no inherent benefit of running more than one remote actor per node for CPU-only training. This is because XGBoost can already leverage multiple CPUs via threading.

However, there are some cases when you should consider starting more than one actor per node:

  • For multi GPU training, each GPU should have a separate remote actor. Thus, if your machine has 24 CPUs and 4 GPUs, you will want to start 4 remote actors with 6 CPUs and 1 GPU each
  • In a heterogeneous cluster , you might want to find the greatest common divisor for the number of CPUs. E.g. for a cluster with three nodes of 4, 8, and 12 CPUs, respectively, you should set the number of actors to 6 and the CPUs per actor to 4.

How to use GPUs for training?

Ray AIR enables multi GPU training for XGBoost and LightGBM. The core backends will automatically leverage NCCL2 for cross-device communication. All you have to do is to start one actor per GPU and set GPU-compatible parameters, e.g. XGBoost's tree_method to gpu_hist (see XGBoost documentation for more details.)

For instance, if you have 2 machines with 4 GPUs each, you will want to start 8 workers, and set use_gpu=True. There is usually no benefit in allocating less (e.g. 0.5) or more than one GPU per actor.

You should divide the CPUs evenly across actors per machine, so if your machines have 16 CPUs in addition to the 4 GPUs, each actor should have 4 CPUs to use.

doc_code/gbdt_user_guide.py

How to optimize XGBoost memory usage?

XGBoost uses a compute-optimized datastructure, the DMatrix, to hold training data. When converting a dataset to a DMatrix, XGBoost creates intermediate copies and ends up holding a complete copy of the full data. The data will be converted into the local dataformat (on a 64 bit system these are 64 bit floats.) Depending on the system and original dataset dtype, this matrix can thus occupy more memory than the original dataset.

The peak memory usage for CPU-based training is at least 3x the dataset size (assuming dtype float32 on a 64bit system) plus about 400,000 KiB for other resources, like operating system requirements and storing of intermediate results.

Example

  • Machine type: AWS m5.xlarge (4 vCPUs, 16 GiB RAM)
  • Usable RAM: ~15,350,000 KiB
  • Dataset: 1,250,000 rows with 1024 features, dtype float32. Total size: 5,000,000 KiB
  • XGBoost DMatrix size: ~10,000,000 KiB

This dataset will fit exactly on this node for training.

Note that the DMatrix size might be lower on a 32 bit system.

GPUs

Generally, the same memory requirements exist for GPU-based training. Additionally, the GPU must have enough memory to hold the dataset.

In the example above, the GPU must have at least 10,000,000 KiB (about 9.6 GiB) memory. However, empirically we found that using a DeviceQuantileDMatrix seems to show more peak GPU memory usage, possibly for intermediate storage when loading data (about 10%).

Best practices

In order to reduce peak memory usage, consider the following suggestions:

  • Store data as float32 or less. More precision is often not needed, and keeping data in a smaller format will help reduce peak memory usage for initial data loading.
  • Pass the dtype when loading data from CSV. Otherwise, floating point values will be loaded as np.float64 per default, increasing peak memory usage by 33%.