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TensorFlow Release 23.04

The NVIDIA container image of TensorFlow, release 23.04, is available on NGC.

Note:

Deprecation notice: As of the current 23.04 release, TF1 is no longer released monthly. Known issues may be resolved in a future release based on customer demand.

Contents of the TensorFlow container

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

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

Driver Requirements

Release 23.04 is based on CUDA 12.1.0, which requires NVIDIA Driver release 530 or later. However, if you are running on a data center GPU (for example, T4 or any other data center GPU), you can use NVIDIA driver release 450.51 (or later R450), 470.57 (or later R470), 510.47 (or later R510), 515.65 (or later R515), 525.85 (or later R525), or 530.30 (or later R530). The CUDA driver's compatibility package only supports particular drivers. Thus, users should upgrade from all R418, R440, R460, and R520 drivers, which are not forward-compatible with CUDA 12.1. For a complete list of supported drivers, see the CUDA Application Compatibility topic. For more information, see CUDA Compatibility and Upgrades.

Key Features and Enhancements

This TensorFlow release includes the following key features and enhancements.

Announcements

  • As of the current 23.04 release, TF1 is no longer released monthly. Known issues may be solved in a future release based on customer demand.
  • Starting with the 22.05 release, the TensorFlow 1 and 2 containers are available for the Arm SBSA platform.

    For example, pulling the Docker image nvcr.io/nvidia/tensorflow:22.05-tf2-py3 Docker image on an Arm SBSA machine will automatically fetch the Arm-specific image.

  • Support for Slurm PMI2 has been removed from the 22.01 release.

    PMIX is supported by the container, but is not supported by default in Slurm. Users who depend on Slurm integration might need to configure Slurm for PMIX in the base OS as appropriate to their OS distribution (for Ubuntu 20.04, the required package is slurm-wlm-basic-plugins).

NVIDIA TensorFlow Container Versions

The following table shows what versions of Ubuntu, CUDA, TensorFlow, and TensorRT are supported in each of the NVIDIA containers for TensorFlow. For older container versions, refer to the Frameworks Support Matrix.
Container Version Ubuntu CUDA Toolkit TensorFlow TensorRT
23.04 20.04 NVIDIA CUDA 12.1.0 2.12.0 TensorRT 8.6.1
23.03

2.11.0

1.15.5

TensorRT 8.5.3
23.02 NVIDIA CUDA 12.0.1
23.01 TensorRT 8.5.2.2
22.12 NVIDIA CUDA 11.8.0

2.10.1

1.15.5

TensorRT 8.5.1
22.11

2.10.0

1.15.5

22.10 TensorRT 8.5 EA
22.09

2.9.1

1.15.5

22.08 NVIDIA CUDA 11.7.1 TensorRT 8.4.2.4
22.07 NVIDIA CUDA 11.7 Update 1 Preview TensorRT 8.4.1
22.06 TensorRT 8.2.5
22.05 NVIDIA CUDA 11.7.0

2.8.0

1.15.5

22.04 NVIDIA CUDA 11.6.2 TensorRT 8.2.4.2
22.03 NVIDIA CUDA 11.6.1 TensorRT 8.2.3
22.02 NVIDIA CUDA 11.6.0

2.7.0

1.15.5

TensorRT 8.2.3
22.01 TensorRT 8.2.2
21.12 NVIDIA CUDA 11.5.0

2.6.2

1.15.5

TensorRT 8.2.1.8
21.11

2.6.0

1.15.5

TensorRT 8.0.3.4 for x64 Linux

TensorRT 8.0.2.2 for Arm SBSA Linux

21.10 NVIDIA CUDA 11.4.2 with cuBLAS 11.6.5.2
21.09 NVIDIA CUDA 11.4.2 TensorRT 8.0.3
21.08 NVIDIA CUDA 11.4.1

2.5.0

1.15.5

TensorRT 8.0.1.6
21.07 NVIDIA CUDA 11.4.0
21.06 NVIDIA CUDA 11.3.1

2.5.0

1.15.5

TensorRT 7.2.3.4
21.05 NVIDIA CUDA 11.3.0

2.4.0

1.15.5

21.04
21.03 NVIDIA CUDA 11.2.1 TensorRT 7.2.2.3
21.02 NVIDIA CUDA 11.2.0 TensorRT 7.2.2.3+cuda11.1.0.024
20.12 NVIDIA CUDA 11.1.1

2.3.1

1.15.4

TensorRT 7.2.2
20.11

18.04

NVIDIA CUDA 11.1.0 TensorRT 7.2.1
20.10
20.09 NVIDIA CUDA 11.0.3

2.3.0

1.15.3

TensorRT 7.1.3
20.08

2.2.0

1.15.3

20.07 NVIDIA CUDA 11.0.194
20.06 NVIDIA CUDA 11.0.167

2.2.0

1.15.2

TensorRT 7.1.2

20.03

20.02

NVIDIA CUDA 10.2.89

2.1.0

1.15.2

TensorRT 7.0.0

20.01

2.0.0

1.15.0

19.12

19.11

TensorRT 6.0.1
19.10 NVIDIA CUDA 10.1.243 1.14.0
19.09
19.08 TensorRT 5.1.5

Tensor Core Examples

The tensor core examples provided in GitHub focus on achieving the best performance and convergence by using the latest deep learning example networks and model scripts for training. Each example model trains with mixed precision Tensor Cores on NVIDIA Volta, therefore you can get results much faster than training without Tensor Cores. This model is tested against each NGC monthly container release to ensure consistent accuracy and performance over time.

  • U-Net Medical model: This model is a convolutional neural network for 2D image segmentation.

    This repository contains a U-Net implementation as described in the U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation paper, without any alteration.

    This model script is available on GitHub and NGC.

  • Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF) model: This model is a neural network that provides collaborative filtering based on implicit feedback, specifically, it provides product recommendations based on user and item interactions.

    The training data for this model should contain a sequence of user ID, item ID pairs indicating that the specified user has interacted with, for example, was given a rating to or clicked on, the specified item.

    This model script is available on GitHub and NGC.

  • BERT model: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a new method of pre-training language representations which obtains state-of-the-art results on a wide array of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks.

    This model is based on BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding paper. BERT is an optimized version of Google's official implementation, which leverages mixed-precision arithmetic and Tensor Cores on V100 GPUs for faster training times and maintains target accuracy.

    This model script is available on GitHub and NGC.

Known Issues

  • Up to 99% perf regressions across all EfficientDet model configs.
  • Collecting profiles with the native TensorFlow profiler may result in an application crash with the error “double free or corruption” due to a bug in the CUPTI library. This will be fixed in a future release.
  • The default set of Keras optimizers are not currently compatible with Horovod, see github issues [1], [2]. Using the old optimizers (available now under tf.keras.optimizers.legacy) resolves the errors.
  • Some DLRM models may regress by 10-40%. We are currently investigating.
  • A known performance regression of up to 50% affects some efficientnet models. The regression is inherited from upstream tensorflow and is still under investigation. It will be fixed in a subsequent release.
  • The TF-TRT native segment fallback has a known issue that causes a crash.

    This issue occurs when you use TF-TRT to convert a model with a subgraph that is then converted to TensorRT, but the conversion fails to build. Instead of falling back to native TensorFlow, TF-TRT will crash.

    To prevent the conversion of an OP that causes a native segment fallback, use export TF_TRT_OP_DENYLIST="ProblematicOp".

  • A known issue affects aarch64 libgomp, which might sometimes cause cannot allocate memory in static TLS block errors.

    The workaround is to run the following command:

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    export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libgomp.so.1

  • In some configurations, the UNet3D model on A100 fails to initialize CUDNN due to an OOM. This can be fixed by increasing the GPU memory carveout with the environment variable TF_DEVICE_MIN_SYS_MEMORY_IN_MB=2000.
  • There is a known performance regression in XLA that can cause performance regressions of up to 55% when training certain models such as EfficientNet with XLA enabled. The root cause is under investigation and will be fixed in a future release.
  • On H100 NVLink systems using 2 GPUs for training, certain communication patterns can trigger a corner-case bug that manifests either as a hang or as an "illegal instruction" exception. A workaround for this case is to set the environment variable NCCL_PROTO=^LL128. This issue will be addressed in an upcoming release.

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