Note

As a reminder, there are many built-in custom operators in deps/CustomOps and they are good resources for understanding custom operators. The following is a step-by-step instruction on how custom operators are implemented.

The Need for Custom Operators

Custom operators are ways to add missing features or improve performance critical components in ADCME. Typically users do not have to worry about custom operators. However, in the following situation custom opreators might be very useful

• Direct implementation in ADCME is inefficient, e.g., vectorizing some codes is difficult.
• There are legacy codes users want to reuse, such as Fortran libraries or adjoint-state method solvers.
• Special acceleration techniques, such as checkpointing scheme, MPI-enabled linear solvers, and FPGA/GPU-accelerated codes.

The Philosophy of Implementing Custom Operators

Usually the motivation for implementing custom operators is to enable gradient backpropagation for some performance critical operators. However, not all performance critical operators participate the automatic differentiation. Using terminologies from programming, these computations are "constant expressions", which can be evaluated at compilation time (constant folding). Therefore, before we devote ourselves to implementating custom operators, we need to identify which operators need to be implemented as custom operators.

This identification task can be done by sketching out the computational graph of your program. Assume your optimization outer loops update $x$ repeatly, then we can track all downstream the operators that depend on this parameter $x$. We call the dependent operators "tensor operations", because they are essentially TensorFlow operators that consume and output tensors. The dependent variables are called "tensors". The counterpart of tensors and tensor operations are "numerical arrays" and "numerical operations", respectively. The names seem a bit vague here but the essence is that numerical operations/arrays do no participate automatic differentiation during the optimization, so the values can be precomputed only once during the entire optimization process.

In ADCME, we can precompute all numerical quantities of numerical arrays using Julia. No TensorFlow operators or custom operators are needed. This procedure combines the best of the two worlds: the simple syntax and high performance computing environment provided by Julia, and the efficient AD capability provided by TensorFlow. The high performance computing for precomputing cannot be provided by Python, the main scripting language that TensorFlow or PyTorch supports. Readers migh suspect that such precomputing may not be significant in many tasks. Actually, the precomputing constitutes a large portion in scientific computing. For example, researchers assemble matrices, prepare geometries and construct preconditioners in a finite element program. These tasks are by no means trivial and cheap. The consideration for performance in scientific computing actually forms the major motivation behind adopting Julia for the major language for ADCME.

Build Custom Operators

In the following, we present an example of implementing a sparse solver for $Au=b$ as a custom operator.

Input: row vector ii, column vectorjj and value vector vv for the sparse coefficient matrix $A$; row vector kk and value vector ff for the right hand side $b$; the coefficient matrix dimension is $d\times d$

Output: solution vector $u\in \mathbb{R}^d$

Step 1: Create and modify the template file

The following command helps create the wrapper

customop()

There will be a custom_op.txt in the current directory. Modify the template file

MySparseSolver
int32 ii(?)
int32 jj(?)
double vv(?)
int32 kk(?)
double ff(?)
int32 d()
double u(?) -> output

The first line is the name of the operator. It should always be in the camel case.

The 2nd to the 7th lines specify the input arguments, the signature is type+variable name+shape. For the shape, () corresponds to a scalar, (?) to a vector and (?,?) to a matrix. The variable names must be in lower cases. Additionally, the supported types are: int32, int64, float, double, bool and string.

The last line is the output, denoted by -> output (do not forget the whitespace before and after ->).

Note

If there are non-real type outputs, the corresponding top gradients input to the gradient kernel should be removed.

Step 2: Implement the kernels

Run customop() again and there will be CMakeLists.txt, gradtest.jl, MySparseSolver.cpp appearing in the current directory. MySparseSolver.cpp is the main wrapper for the codes and gradtest.jl is used for testing the operator and its gradients. CMakeLists.txt is the file for compilation. In the gradient back-propagation (backward below), we want to back-propagate the gradients from the output to the inputs, and the associated rule can be derived using adjoint-state methods.

Create a new file MySparseSolver.h and implement both the forward simulation and backward simulation (gradients)

#include <eigen3/Eigen/Sparse>
#include <eigen3/Eigen/SparseLU>
#include <vector>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
typedef Eigen::SparseMatrix<double> SpMat; // declares a column-major sparse matrix type of double
typedef Eigen::Triplet<double> T;

SpMat A;

void forward(double *u, const int *ii, const int *jj, const double *vv, int nv, const int *kk, const double *ff,int nf,  int d){
vector<T> triplets;
Eigen::VectorXd rhs(d); rhs.setZero();
for(int i=0;i<nv;i++){
triplets.push_back(T(ii[i]-1,jj[i]-1,vv[i]));
}
for(int i=0;i<nf;i++){
rhs[kk[i]-1] += ff[i];
}
A.resize(d, d);
A.setFromTriplets(triplets.begin(), triplets.end());
auto C = Eigen::MatrixXd(A);
Eigen::SparseLU<SpMat> solver;
solver.analyzePattern(A);
solver.factorize(A);
auto x = solver.solve(rhs);
for(int i=0;i<d;i++) u[i] = x[i];
}

void backward(double *grad_vv, const double *grad_u, const int *ii, const int *jj, const double *u, int nv, int d){
Eigen::VectorXd g(d);
auto B = A.transpose();
Eigen::SparseLU<SpMat> solver;
solver.analyzePattern(B);
solver.factorize(B);
auto x = solver.solve(g);
// cout << x << endl;
for(int i=0;i<nv;i++){
}
}
Note

In this implementation we have used Eigen library for solving sparse matrix. Other choices are also possible, such as algebraic multigrid methods. Note here for convenience we have created a global variable SpMat A;. This is not recommend if you want to run the code concurrently, since the variable A must be overwritten by another concurrent thread.

Step 3: Compile

You should always compile your custom operator using the built-in toolchain ADCME.make and ADCME.cmake to ensure compatibility such as ABIs. The built-in toolchain uses exactly the same compiler that has been used to compile your tensorflow shared library. For example, some of the toolchain variables are:

VariableDescription
ADCME.CXXC++ Compiler
ADCME.CCC Compiler
ADCME.TF_LIB_FILElibtensorflow_framework.so location
ADCME.CMAKECmake binary location
ADCME.MAKEMake (Ninja for Unix systems) binary location

ADCME will properly handle the environment variable for you. So we always recommend you to compile custom operators using ADCME functions:

First cd into your custom operator director (where CMakeLists.txt is located), create a directory build if it doesn't exist, cd into build, and do

julia> using ADCME
julia> ADCME.make()

Based on your operation system, you will create libMySparseSolver.{so,dylib,dll}. This will be the dynamic library to link in TensorFlow.

Step 4: Test

Finally, you could use gradtest.jl to test the operator and its gradients (specify appropriate data in gradtest.jl first). If you implement the gradients correctly, you will be able to obtain first order convergence for finite difference and second order convergence for automatic differentiation. Note you need to modify this file first, e.g., creating data and modifying the function scalar_function.

Info

If the process fails, it is most probable the GCC compiler is not compatible with which was used to compile libtensorflow_framework.{so,dylib}. ADCME downloads a GCC compiler via Conda for you. However, if you follow the above steps but encounter some problems, we are happy to resolve the compatibility issue and improve the robustness of ADCME. Submitting an issue is welcome.

Please see this repository for an extra example.

Build GPU Custom Operators

Install GPU-enabled TensorFlow (Linux and Windows)

To use CUDA in ADCME, we need to install a GPU-enabled version of TensorFlow. In ADCME, this is achieved by simply rebuilding ADCME with GPU environment variabe.

using Pkg
ENV["GPU"] = 1
Pkg.build("ADCME")

This will install all GPU dependencies.

Building a GPU custom operator

We consider a toy example where the custom operator is a function $f: x\rightarrow 2x$. To begin with, we create a custom_op.txt via customop

GpuTest
double a(?)
double b(?) -> output

Next, by running customop() again several template files are generated. We can then do the implementation in those files

GpuTest.cpp

#include "tensorflow/core/framework/op_kernel.h"
#include "tensorflow/core/framework/tensor_shape.h"
#include "tensorflow/core/platform/default/logging.h"
#include "tensorflow/core/framework/shape_inference.h"
#include<cmath>

// Signatures for GPU kernels here
void return_double(int n, double *b, const double*a);
using namespace tensorflow;

REGISTER_OP("GpuTest")

.Input("a : double")
.Output("b : double")
.SetShapeFn([](::tensorflow::shape_inference::InferenceContext* c) {

shape_inference::ShapeHandle a_shape;
TF_RETURN_IF_ERROR(c->WithRank(c->input(0), 1, &a_shape));

c->set_output(0, c->input(0));
return Status::OK();
});

.Input("b : double")
.Input("a : double")

class GpuTestOpGPU : public OpKernel {
private:

public:
explicit GpuTestOpGPU(OpKernelConstruction* context) : OpKernel(context) {

}

void Compute(OpKernelContext* context) override {
DCHECK_EQ(1, context->num_inputs());

const Tensor& a = context->input(0);

const TensorShape& a_shape = a.shape();

DCHECK_EQ(a_shape.dims(), 1);

// extra check

// create output shape
int n = a_shape.dim_size(0);
TensorShape b_shape({n});

// create output tensor

Tensor* b = NULL;
OP_REQUIRES_OK(context, context->allocate_output(0, b_shape, &b));

// get the corresponding Eigen tensors for data access

auto a_tensor = a.flat<double>().data();
auto b_tensor = b->flat<double>().data();

// implement your forward function here

// TODO:
return_double(n, b_tensor, a_tensor);

}
};
REGISTER_KERNEL_BUILDER(Name("GpuTest").Device(DEVICE_GPU), GpuTestOpGPU);

GpuTest.cu

#include "cuda.h"

__global__ void return_double_(int n, double *b, const double*a){
int i = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
if (i<n) b[i] = 2*a[i];
}

void return_double(int n, double *b, const double*a){
return_double_<<<(n+255)/256, 256>>>(n, b, a);
}

CMakeLists.txt

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.5)
project(TF_CUSTOM_OP)
set (CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 11)

message("JULIA=${JULIA}") execute_process(COMMAND${JULIA} -e "import ADCME; print(ADCME.__STR__)" OUTPUT_VARIABLE JL_OUT)

list(GET JL_OUT 0 BINDIR)
list(GET JL_OUT 1 LIBDIR)
list(GET JL_OUT 2 TF_INC)
list(GET JL_OUT 3 TF_ABI)
list(GET JL_OUT 4 PREFIXDIR)
list(GET JL_OUT 5 CC)
list(GET JL_OUT 6 CXX)
list(GET JL_OUT 7 CMAKE)
list(GET JL_OUT 8 MAKE)
list(GET JL_OUT 9 GIT)
list(GET JL_OUT 10 PYTHON)
list(GET JL_OUT 11 TF_LIB_FILE)
list(GET JL_OUT 12 LIBCUDA)
list(GET JL_OUT 13 CUDA_INC)

message("Python path=${PYTHON}") message("PREFIXDIR=${PREFIXDIR}")
message("TF_INC=${TF_INC}") message("TF_ABI=${TF_ABI}")
message("TF_LIB_FILE=${TF_LIB_FILE}") if (CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_VERSION VERSION_GREATER 5.0 OR CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_VERSION VERSION_EQUAL 5.0) set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=${TF_ABI} ${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS}") endif() set(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release) if(MSVC) set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE "-DNDEBUG") else() set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE "-O3 -DNDEBUG") endif() include_directories(${TF_INC} ${PREFIXDIR}${CUDA_INC})

find_package(CUDA QUIET REQUIRED)
set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-std=c++11 ${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS}") set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-O3${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS}")
set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-shared ${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS}") set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-fPIC${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS}")
set(CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS ${CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS};--expt-relaxed-constexpr) SET(CUDA_PROPAGATE_HOST_FLAGS ON) add_definitions(-DGOOGLE_CUDA) message("Compiling GPU-compatible custom operator!") cuda_add_library(GpuTest SHARED GpuTest.cpp GpuTest.cu) set_property(TARGET GpuTest PROPERTY POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE ON) target_link_libraries(GpuTest${TF_LIB_FILE})
file(MAKE_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/build) set_target_properties(GpuTest PROPERTIES LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/build RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_RELEASE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/build) We can then compile the operator on a system where nvcc is available: change_directory("build") ADCME.cmake() ADCME.make() Running a GPU custom operator We can now run a GPU operator by loading the shared library using ADCME function gpu_test(a) gpu_test_ = load_op_and_grad("$(@__DIR__)/build/libGpuTest","gpu_test")
a = convert_to_tensor([a], [Float64]); a = a[1]
gpu_test_(a)
end

# TODO: specify your input parameters
a = [1.0;3.0;-1.0]
u = gpu_test(a)
sess = Session(); init(sess)
run(sess, u)

If we run the file on a system without GPU resources, we will get the following error

 <class 'tensorflow.python.framework.errors_impl.InvalidArgumentError'>

If we have GPU resources, the kernel will run correctly with the output

2.0
6.0
-2.0

Batch Build

At some point, you might have a lot of custom operators. Building one-by-one will take up too much time. To reduce the building time, you might want to build all the operators all at once concurrently. To this end, you can consider batch build by using a common CMakeLists.txt. The commands in the CMakeLists.txt are the same as a typical custom operator, except that the designated libraries are different

# ... The same as a typical CMake script ...

# Specify all the library paths and library names.
set(LIBDIR_NAME VolumetricStrain ComputeVel DirichletBd
FemStiffness FemStiffness1 SpatialFemStiffness
SpatialVaryingTangentElastic Strain Strain1
StrainEnergy StrainEnergy1)
set(LIB_NAME VolumetricStrain ComputeVel DirichletBd
FemStiffness UnivariateFemStiffness SpatialFemStiffness
SpatialVaryingTangentElastic StrainOp StrainOpUnivariate
StrainEnergy StrainEnergyUnivariate)

# Copy and paste the following lines (no modification is required)
list(LENGTH "LIBDIR_NAME" LIBLENGTH)
message("Total number of libraries to make: ${LIBLENGTH}") MATH(EXPR LIBLENGTH "${LIBLENGTH}-1")
foreach(IDX RANGE 0 ${LIBLENGTH}) list(GET LIBDIR_NAME${IDX} _LIB_DIR)
list(GET LIB_NAME ${IDX} _LIB_NAME) message("Compiling${IDX}th library: ${_LIB_DIR}==>${_LIB_NAME}")
file(MAKE_DIRECTORY ${_LIB_DIR}/build) add_library(${_LIB_NAME} SHARED ${_LIB_DIR}/${_LIB_NAME}.cpp)
set_property(TARGET ${_LIB_NAME} PROPERTY POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE ON) set_target_properties(${_LIB_NAME} PROPERTIES LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/${_LIB_DIR}/build)
target_link_libraries(${_LIB_NAME}${TF_LIB_FILE})
endforeach(IDX)

To ensure that TensorFlow can find all the registered symbols, it is recommended that you should always load the shared libraries first if you also run ccall on the shared library. This can be done using load_library to obtain a handle to the shared library. Then you can use the handle in load_op_and_grad or load_op. For example

lib = load_library("path/to/my/library")
my_custom_op = load_op_and_grad(lib, "my_custom_op")

Error Handling

Sometimes we might encounter error in C++ kernels and we want to propagate the error to the Julia interface. This is done by OP_REQUIRES_OK. Its syntax is

OP_REQUIRES_OK(context, status)

where context is either a OpKernelConstruction or a OpKernelContext, and status can be created using

Status(error::Code::ERROR_CODE, message)

Here ERROR_CODE is one of the following:

OK = 0,
CANCELLED = 1,
UNKNOWN = 2,
INVALID_ARGUMENT = 3,
NOT_FOUND = 5,
PERMISSION_DENIED = 7,
UNAUTHENTICATED = 16,
RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED = 8,
FAILED_PRECONDITION = 9,
ABORTED = 10,
OUT_OF_RANGE = 11,
UNIMPLEMENTED = 12,
INTERNAL = 13,
UNAVAILABLE = 14,
DATA_LOSS = 15,
Code_INT_MIN_SENTINEL_DO_NOT_USE_ = std::numeric_limits<::PROTOBUF_NAMESPACE_ID::int32>::min(),
Code_INT_MAX_SENTINEL_DO_NOT_USE_ = std::numeric_limits<::PROTOBUF_NAMESPACE_ID::int32>::max()

message is a string.

For example,

OP_REQUIRES_OK(context,
Status(error::Code::UNAVAILABLE, "Sparse solver type not supported."));

Logging

TensorFlow has a C++ level logging system. We can conveniently log messages to specific streams using the folloing syntax

VLOG(INFO) << message;
VLOG(WARNING) << message;
VLOG(ERROR) << message;
VLOG(FATAL) << message;
VLOG(NUM_SEVERITIES) << message;

Sometimes you might encounter NotFoundError() when using tf.load_op_library on Windows system, despite that the library you referred does exist. You can then check using Libdl

using Libdl
dlopen(<MySharedLibrary.dll>)

and you still get an error

ERROR: could not load library "MySharedLibrary.dll"
The specified module could not be found. 

This is annoying. The reason is that when you load this shared library on windows, the system looks for all its dependencies. If at least one of the dependent library is not in the path, then the error occurs. To solve this problem, you need a dependency walker, such as die.exe.

For example, in the following right panel we see a lot of dynamic libraries. They must be in the system path so that we can load the current dynamic library (dlopen(...)).

Main WindowImport Window

Miscellany

Mutable Inputs

Sometimes we want to modify tensors in place. In this case we can use mutable inputs. Mutable inputs must be Variable and it must be forwarded to one of the output. We consider implement a my_assign operator, with signature

my_assign(u::PyObject, v::PyObject)::PyObject

Here u is a Variable and we copy the data from v to u. In the MyAssign.cpp file, we modify the input and output specifications to

.Input("u : Ref(double)")
.Input("v : double")
.Output("w : Ref(double)")

In addition, the input tensor is obtained through

Tensor u = context->mutable_input(0, true);

The second argument lock_held specifies whether the input mutex is acquired (false) before the operation. Note the output must be a Tensor instead of a reference.

To forward the input, use

context->forward_ref_input_to_ref_output(0,0);

We use the following code snippet to test the program

my_assign = load_op("./build/libMyAssign","my_assign")
u = Variable([0.1,0.2,0.3])
v = constant(Array{Float64}(1:3))
u2 = u^2
w = my_assign(u,v)
sess = tf.Session()
init(sess)
@show run(sess, u)
@show run(sess, u2)
@show run(sess, w)
@show run(sess, u2)

The output is

[0.1,0.2,0.3]
[0.1,0.04,0.09]
[1.0,2.0,3.0]
[1.0,4.0,9.0]

We can see that the tensors depending on u are also aware of the assign operator. The complete programs can be downloaded here: CMakeLists.txt, MyAssign.cpp, gradtest.jl.

Third-party Plugins

ADCME also allows third-party custom operators hosted on Github. To build your own custom operators, implement your own custom operators in a Github repository.

Users are free to arrange other source files or other third-party libraries.

Upon using those libraries in ADCME, users first download those libraries to deps directory via

pth = install("OTNetwork")

pth is the dynamic library product generated with source codes in OTNetwork. The official plugins are hosted on https://github.com/ADCMEMarket. To get access to the custom operators in ADCME, use

op = load_op_and_grad(pth, "ot_network"; multiple=true)

Troubleshooting

Here are some common errors you might encounter during custom operator compilation:

Q: The cmake output for the Julia path is empty.

Julia=

A: Check whether which julia outputs the Julia location you are using.

Q: The cmake output for Python path, Eigen path, etc., is empty.

Python path=
PREFIXDIR=
TF_INC=
TF_ABI=
TF_LIB_FILE=

using ADCME
ADCME.__STR__
A: Remove the corresponding packages using using Pkg; Pkg.rm(XXX) and reinstall those packages.
ERROR: LoadError: ADCME is not properly built; run Pkg.build("ADCME") to fix the problem.
A: Build ADCME using Pkg.build("ADCME"). Exit Julia and open Julia again. Check whether deps.jl exists in the deps directory of your Julia package (optional).