Ask HN: Keras on PyPy?

4 points by RocketSyntax ↗ HN
Wondering if non-standard interpreters like pypy and cpython can be used to speed up training.

6 comments

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Asked about this before. I was told no one cared since the real work is done in C and would not benefit from pypy. So the python level optimizations would not affect much.
Not entirely true. For good utilization you need both GPU/TPU ops to be fast (written in C), but that won’t get you far if your input pipeline (possibly written in python) is slow. I could imagine if all the TF calls work in PyPy, that it would help with throughout by speeding up the input pipeline and keeping the GPU/TPU saturated more effectively. One solution is to write everything to TFRecords, but for experimentation that’s kinda annoying.
Ah, I figured it was all Python. Now it makes sense why tensor objects are such a pain to work with.

C++ 60.6% Python 30.6%

I got stuck on this problem a while ago. I was doing reinforcement learning and the environment needed to run in pypy to make it fast enough. I ended up using Pyro4 to bridge pypy (environment) and CPython (keras).
> non-standard interpreters like pypy and cpython

Isn't CPython the default and most standard interpreter?