TensorFlow Release 18.10
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TensorFlow Release 18.10 (PDF)

The NVIDIA container image of TensorFlow, release 18.10, is available.

Contents of TensorFlow

This container image contains the complete source of the version of NVIDIA TensorFlow in /opt/tensorflow. It is pre-built and installed as a system Python module.

To achieve optimum TensorFlow performance, for image based training, the container includes a sample script that demonstrates efficient training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The sample script may need to be modified to fit your application. The container also includes the following:

Driver Requirements

Release 18.10 is based on CUDA 10, which requires NVIDIA Driver release 410.xx. However, if you are running on Tesla (Tesla V100, Tesla P4, Tesla P40, or Tesla P100), you may use NVIDIA driver release 384. For more information, see CUDA Compatibility and Upgrades.

Key Features and Enhancements

This TensorFlow release includes the following key features and enhancements.

  • TensorFlow container image version 18.10 is based on TensorFlow 1.10.0.
  • Latest version of NCCL 2.3.6.
  • Latest version of DALI 0.4 Beta
  • Latest version of OpenMPI 3.1.2
  • Fixed a bug in the ResNet example script when using NHWC data format.
  • Fixed several issues when accelerating inference in TensorFlow with TensorRT including support for ReLu6, Identity, and dilated convolutions.
  • Ubuntu 16.04 with September 2018 updates

Accelerating Inference In TensorFlow With TensorRT (TF-TRT)

For step-by-step instructions on how to use TF-TRT, see Accelerating Inference In TensorFlow With TensorRT User Guide.

Key Features And Enhancements

  • New examples at nvidia-examples/tftrt with good accuracy and performance.

  • Built TF-TRT with TensorRT 5.0.0 which introduces the new TensorRT APIs into TF-TRT.

  • Added support for the TensorFlow operator RELU6 (using Relu6(x) = min(Relu(x), 6)).

  • Made improvements in the image classification example, such as bug fixes and using the dynamic_op feature.

Limitations

  • Not all the new TensorRT 5.0.0 features are supported yet in TF-TRT including INT8 quantization ranges and the plugins registry.

  • We have only tested image classification models with TF-TRT including the ones we have provided in our examples inside the container (nvidia-examples/tftrt). This means object detection, translation (convolutional and recurrent based) are not yet supported due to either functionality or performance limitations.

  • TF-TRT has an implementation of optimizing the TensorFlow graph by specifying appropriate TensorFlow session arguments without using the Python TF-TRT API (create_inference_graph), however, we have not thoroughly tested this functionality yet, therefore, we don’t support it.

Known Issues

  • Running inference with batch sizes larger than the maximum batch size is not supported by TensorRT.

  • Due to certain logs (errors or warnings) of TF-TRT, they could be misleading and point to the TensorRT graph as broken while it’s not. It is recommended to check whether there is any TensorRT op in the graph (the type of op is TRTEngineOp). If there is not TensorRT ops in the graph, that means no conversion has happened and the inference should fall back to the native TensorFlow. Currently, the best way to verify whether a frozen graph resulting from the conversion is not broken is to run inference on it and check the accuracy of the results.

  • There are operators that are not supported by either TensorRT or the conversion algorithm. The convertor is supposed to skip these ops but this skip may not happen properly due to bugs. One way to get around this problem is to increase the value of the minimum_segment_size parameter and hope that the subgraphs that contain those ops are too small and remain out of the conversion.

  • We have observed functionality problems in optimizing:
    • NASNet models with TF-TRT in FP16 precision mode.
    • ResNet, MobileNet, and NASNet models with TF-TRT in INT8 precision mode.
    Note:

    TF-TRT cannot optimize certain models such as ResNet in INT8 precision mode because of a lacking feature in TensorRT regarding the dimensionality of tensors. Usually, increasing the value of minimum_segment_size is a workaround by removing those unsupported dimensions out of the TensorRT sub-graph.


  • TF-TRT doesn’t work with TensorFlow Lite due to a TensorRT bug that causes Flatbuffer symbols to be exposed. This means you cannot import both tf.contrib.tensorrt and tf.lite in the same process.

  • We have observed a bit low accuracy on image classification models with TF-TRT on Jetson AGX Xavier.

  • INT8 calibration on mobilenet_v1 and mobilenet_v2 using TF-TRT fails if the calibration dataset has only one element.

Announcements

Support for accelerating TensorFlow with TensorRT 3.x will be removed in a future release (likely TensorFlow 1.13). The generated plan files are not portable across platforms or TensorRT versions. Plans are specific to the exact GPU model they were built on (in addition to the platforms and the TensorRT version) and must be retargeted to the specific GPU in case you want to run them on a different GPU. Therefore, models that were accelerated using TensorRT 3.x will no longer run. If you have a production model that was accelerated with TensorRT 3.x, you will need to convert your model with TensorRT 4.x or later again.

For more information, see the Note in Serializing A Model In C++ or Serializing A Model In Python.

Known Issues

OpenSeq2Seq is only supported in the Python 3 container.

© Copyright 2024, NVIDIA. Last updated on Apr 5, 2024.