How to avoid CUDA Out-of-Memory

Memory Utilities

One of the most frustrating errors when it comes to running training scripts is hitting “CUDA Out-of-Memory”, as the entire script needs to be restarted, progress is lost, and typically a developer would want to simply start their script and let it run.

Accelerate provides a utility heavily based on toma to give this capability.

find_executable_batch_size

This algorithm operates with exponential decay, decreasing the batch size in half after each failed run on some training script. To use it, restructure your training function to include an inner function that includes this wrapper, and build your dataloaders inside it. At a minimum, this could look like 4 new lines of code.

Note: The inner function must take in the batch size as the first parameter, but we do not pass one to it when called. The wrapper handles this for us

It should also be noted that anything which will consume CUDA memory and passed to the accelerator must be declared inside the inner function, such as models and optimizers.

Copied

def training_function(args):
    accelerator = Accelerator()

+   @find_executable_batch_size(starting_batch_size=args.batch_size)
+   def inner_training_loop(batch_size):
+       nonlocal accelerator # Ensure they can be used in our context
+       accelerator.free_memory() # Free all lingering references
        model = get_model()
        model.to(accelerator.device)
        optimizer = get_optimizer()
        train_dataloader, eval_dataloader = get_dataloaders(accelerator, batch_size)
        lr_scheduler = get_scheduler(
            optimizer, 
            num_training_steps=len(train_dataloader)*num_epochs
        )
        model, optimizer, train_dataloader, eval_dataloader, lr_scheduler = accelerator.prepare(
            model, optimizer, train_dataloader, eval_dataloader, lr_scheduler
        )
        train(model, optimizer, train_dataloader, lr_scheduler)
        validate(model, eval_dataloader)
+   inner_training_loop()

To find out more, check the documentation here.