Injecting 3rd Party Data Iterables¶

When training a model on a specific task, data loading and preprocessing might become a bottleneck. Lightning does not enforce a specific data loading approach nor does it try to control it. The only assumption Lightning makes is that the data is returned as an iterable of batches.

For PyTorch-based programs, these iterables are typically instances of DataLoader.

However, Lightning also supports other data types such as plain list of batches, generators or other custom iterables.

# random list of batches
data = [(torch.rand(32, 3, 32, 32), torch.randint(0, 10, (32,))) for _ in range(100)]
model = LitClassifier()
trainer = Trainer()
trainer.fit(model, data)

Examples for custom iterables include NVIDIA DALI or FFCV for computer vision. Both libraries offer support for custom data loading and preprocessing (also hardware accelerated) and can be used with Lightning.

For example, taking the example from FFCV’s readme, we can use it with Lightning by just removing the hardcoded ToDevice(0) as Lightning takes care of GPU placement. In case you want to use some data transformations on GPUs, change the ToDevice(0) to ToDevice(self.trainer.local_rank) to correctly map to the desired GPU in your pipeline.

from ffcv.loader import Loader, OrderOption
from ffcv.transforms import ToTensor, ToDevice, ToTorchImage, Cutout
from ffcv.fields.decoders import IntDecoder, RandomResizedCropRGBImageDecoder


class CustomClassifier(LitClassifier):
    def train_dataloader(self):

        # Random resized crop
        decoder = RandomResizedCropRGBImageDecoder((224, 224))

        # Data decoding and augmentation
        image_pipeline = [decoder, Cutout(), ToTensor(), ToTorchImage()]
        label_pipeline = [IntDecoder(), ToTensor()]

        # Pipeline for each data field
        pipelines = {"image": image_pipeline, "label": label_pipeline}

        # Replaces PyTorch data loader (`torch.utils.data.Dataloader`)
        loader = Loader(
            write_path, batch_size=bs, num_workers=num_workers, order=OrderOption.RANDOM, pipelines=pipelines
        )

        return loader

When moving data to a specific device, you can always refer to self.trainer.local_rank to get the accelerator used by the current process.

By just changing device_id=0 to device_id=self.trainer.local_rank we can also leverage DALI’s GPU decoding:

from nvidia.dali.pipeline import pipeline_def
import nvidia.dali.types as types
import nvidia.dali.fn as fn
from nvidia.dali.plugin.pytorch import DALIGenericIterator
import os


class CustomLitClassifier(LitClassifier):
    def train_dataloader(self):

        # To run with different data, see documentation of nvidia.dali.fn.readers.file
        # points to https://github.com/NVIDIA/DALI_extra
        data_root_dir = os.environ["DALI_EXTRA_PATH"]
        images_dir = os.path.join(data_root_dir, "db", "single", "jpeg")

        @pipeline_def(num_threads=4, device_id=self.trainer.local_rank)
        def get_dali_pipeline():
            images, labels = fn.readers.file(file_root=images_dir, random_shuffle=True, name="Reader")
            # decode data on the GPU
            images = fn.decoders.image_random_crop(images, device="mixed", output_type=types.RGB)
            # the rest of processing happens on the GPU as well
            images = fn.resize(images, resize_x=256, resize_y=256)
            images = fn.crop_mirror_normalize(
                images,
                crop_h=224,
                crop_w=224,
                mean=[0.485 * 255, 0.456 * 255, 0.406 * 255],
                std=[0.229 * 255, 0.224 * 255, 0.225 * 255],
                mirror=fn.random.coin_flip(),
            )
            return images, labels

        train_data = DALIGenericIterator(
            [get_dali_pipeline(batch_size=16)],
            ["data", "label"],
            reader_name="Reader",
        )

        return train_data

Limitations¶

Lightning works with all kinds of custom data iterables as shown above. There are, however, a few features that cannot be supported this way. These restrictions come from the fact that for their support, Lightning needs to know a lot on the internals of these iterables.

In a distributed multi-GPU setting (ddp), Lightning automatically replaces the DataLoader’s sampler with its distributed counterpart. This makes sure that each GPU sees a different part of the dataset. As sampling can be implemented in arbitrary ways with custom iterables, there is no way for Lightning to know, how to replace the sampler.
When training fails for some reason, Lightning is able to extract all of the relevant data from the model, optimizers, trainer and dataloader to resume it at the exact same batch it crashed. This feature is called fault-tolerance and is limited to PyTorch DataLoaders. Lighning needs to know a lot about sampling, fast forwarding and random number handling to enable fault tolerance, meaning that it cannot be supported for arbitrary iterables.