Release Notes

This document describes the key features, software enhancements and improvements, and known issues for DALI 1.37.0. For previously released DALI documentation, see DALI Archives.

Overview

DALI offers both performance and flexibility of accelerating different data pipelines (graphs that can have multiple outputs and inputs), as a single library, that can be easily integrated into different deep learning training and inference applications.

Using DALI

Note

DALI builds for NVIDIA® CUDA® 12 dynamically link the CUDA toolkit. To use DALI, install the latest CUDA toolkit.

To upgrade to DALI 1.37.0 from a previous version of DALI, follow the installation and usage information in the DALI User Guide.

Note

The internal DALI C++ API used for operator’s implementation, and the C++ API that enables using DALI as a library from native code, is not yet officially supported. Hence these APIs may change in the next release without advance notice.

Key Features and Enhancements

This DALI release includes the following key features and enhancements:

  • Added support for running JAX defined augmentations in the iterator and pipeline (5406, 5426, and 5432).

  • Improved error reporting with a stack trace pointing to the offending operation in user code (5357 and 5396).

  • Added the CPU fn.random.choice operator (5380 and (5387).

  • Added support for CUDA 12.4 (5353 and 5410)).

  • Improved iterators checkpointing (5374, 5375, 5371, and 5356).

  • Optimized the fn.resize operator for better GPU utilization (5382).

  • Added an option to skip bboxes in fn.random_bbox_crop with the fraction of area within the crop below the user-provided threshold (5368)).

Fixed Issues

The following fixes are included in this release:

  • Fixed the handling of special values of the stream field in the CUDA Array Interface v3 (5425).

  • Fixed the insufficient synchronization around scratch memory in nvImageCoded-based decoders (fn.experimental.decoders.* and 5408).

  • Fixed the readers from saving an incorrect checkpoint when the readers are restored and saved back in the same epoch (5378).

Breaking Changes

There are no breaking changes in this release.

Deprecated Features

There are no deprecated features in this release.

Known Issues

This DALI release includes the following known issues:

  • The experimental.readers.fits, experimental.decoders.video, experimental.inputs.video, and experimental.decoders.image_random_crop operators do not currently support checkpointing.

  • The video loader operator requires that the key frames occur, at a minimum, every 10 to 15 frames of the video stream.

    If the key frames occur at a frequency that is less than 10-15 frames, the returned frames might be out of sync.

  • The experimental VideoReaderDecoder does not support open GOP.

    It will not report an error and might produce invalid frames. VideoReader uses a heuristic approach to detect open GOP and should work in most common cases.

  • In experimental debug and eager modes, the GPU external source is not properly synchronized with DALI internal streams.

    As a workaround, you can manually synchronize the device before returning the data from the callback.

  • Due to some known issues with meltdown/spectra mitigations and DALI, DALI shows the best performance when running in Docker with escalated privileges, for example:

    • privileged=yes in Extra Settings for AWS data points

    • --privileged or --security-opt seccomp=unconfined for bare Docker