Quick Start on AWS

Milano is a tool for automating hyper-parameters search for your models on a backend of your choice.

Quick Start on AWS

This example will demonstrate how to automate hyper-parameter search with Milano on AWS.

Before you start

If you have a machine with at least on NVIDIA GPU, it is highly recommended that you try Azkaban-based option first. Please see here for a quick start mini-tutorial.

When using AWS make sure you are aware of all the costs involved.

Once finished, make sure all “milano-worker” instances are termiated! (see screenshot below)

milano-workers

Step 1 (Setup AWS access)

  • Registed for AWS account.
  • Create a file ~/.aws/credentials with the following content 
    [default]
aws_access_key_id = ..fill this..
aws_secret_access_key = ..fill this..
  • To create your aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key, please refer to this AWS document.
  • You would also need to create a KeyPair in “US-West (Oregon)” region. Go to https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2 and look for Key Pairs. Once you click “Create Key Pair” .pem file will be downloaded.

Attention: Keep your AWS credentials secret!

Step 2 (Create S3 bucket and upload your data there)

Milano uses S3 buckets for storing training data and saving model checkpoints.

  • Install AWS CLI utility: sudo apt install awscli (on Ubuntu Linux)
  • Create S3 bucket: aws s3api create-bucket --bucket milano-test-data --region us-west-2 --create-bucket-configuration LocationConstraint=us-west-2
    • This command created an S3 bucket called ‘milano-test-data’
    • Make sure you use ‘us-west-2’ region
  • Upload your training data to the bucket you’ve just created. In the steps below we’ll upload CIFAR-10 training data as example:
    • Get data: wget https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar-10-binary.tar.gz
    • Unpack: tar -xvf cifar-10-binary.tar.gz
    • Upload: aws s3 sync cifar-10-batches-bin/ s3://milano-test-data/cifar-10/cifar-10-batches-bin/

Step 3 (Prepare the job script)

Take a look at these example job scripts:

  • “CIFAR-10 classifier model” examples/os2s/cifar10/start_aws.sh
    • This model uses OpenSeq2Seq toolkit which is based on Tensorflow
    • Note that by default this model will look for the data under /data
  • “Simple language model” examples/pytorch/wlm/start_wlm_aws.sh
    • This model uses Pytorch and is taken from Pytorch examples repository without any changes
    • Note that we use /workdir as working directory

For both examples, we set number of epoch to 3 to demonstrate the concept

Step 4 (Prepare the tuning config)

Take a look at these example tuning configs:

  • For CIFAR-10 classifier model: examples/os2s/cifar10/cifar10_aws.py
    • Note “datasets” section of the configuration file - this is how we mount and use S3 bucket with our training set
  • For Simple language model: examples/pytorch/wlm/wlm_aws.py

Note that in both cases we set "num_evals": 3 and "num_workers": 1 for illustration purposes.

You might need to contact AWS support to increase the maximum number of P3 instances you can launch at a time.

User predefined parameters

Before running any random search it is a good idea to test several configurations pre-defined by users. You can do it by including params_to_try_first section in your config. For example (from examples/pytorch/wlm/wlm_aws.py)

# These configurations will be tried first
params_to_try_first = {
  "--model": ["LSTM", "GRU"],
  "--emsize": [1504, 1504],
  "--nlayers": [2, 2],
  "--lr": [20, 25],
  "--bptt": [35, 35],
  "--clip": [0.25, 0.35],
  "--dropout": [0.2, 0.2],
}

The above dictionary defines 2 configurations which (one with LSTM and another one with GRU cells) which will be tried before RandomSearch algorithm starts.

Step 5 (Start tuning)

From the client machine run:

“Simple language model”: python tune.py --config=examples/pytorch/wlm/wlm_aws.py --verbose 3

or “CIFAR-10 classifier model”: python tune.py --config=examples/os2s/cifar10/cifar10_aws.py --verbose 3

Results

By default, the results will be saved in the file results.csv. They will be ordered with the top results first. Also, it will be updated on the fly, as results come in. If a job failed for whatever reason, it will be still logged in results.csv with inf as a result.