Grape: Practical and Efficient Graphed Execution for Dynamic Deep Neural Networks on GPUs

Achieving high performance in machine learning workloads is a crucial yet difficult task. To achieve high runtime performance on hardware platforms such as GPUs, graph-based executions such as CUDA graphs are often used to eliminate CPU runtime overheads by submitting jobs in the granularity of multiple kernels. However, many machine learning workloads, especially dynamic deep neural networks (DNNs) with varying-sized inputs or data-dependent control flows, face challenges when directly using CUDA graphs to achieve optimal performance. We observe that the use of graph-based executions poses three key challenges in terms of efficiency and even practicability: (1) Extra data movements when copying input values to graphs’ placeholders. (2) High GPU memory consumption due to the numerous CUDA graphs created to efficiently support dynamic-shape workloads. (3) Inability to handle data-dependent control flows.