EagerReuse: An Efficient Memory Reuse Approach for Complex Computational Graph

Ruyi Qian, Bojun Cao, Mengjuan Gao, Qinwen Shi, Yida Wang, Yuanchao Xu, Qirun Huo, Keni Qiu

Abstract: Memory reuse is a promising approach for deep neural network (DNN) to reduce memory consumption because it does not introduce any additional runtime overhead. We observe that existing memory reuse algorithms consider only the effect of an individual data feature (either tensor size or tensor lifetime) on memory reuse and ignore the relative position relationship (RPR) among tensors. As computational graphs grow slightly more complex, the mining of memory reuse becomes insufficient. To address this issue, we propose a new memory reuse algorithm—EagerReuse, which can exploit more memory reuse opportunities by analyzing RPR among tensors and reusing them as quickly as possible. We evaluated the algorithms with inference models in TensorFlow Model Garden, and the results show that the EagerReuse outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in three out of seven cases. For more complex computational graphs, EagerReuse can achieve better memory usage with slightly higher but acceptable overhead.