[substation13]

Those are real issues though.

[lopatin]

Is concurrency useful for ML?

[NaiveBayesian]

If your data loading pipeline grows even slightly complex, then yes, you absolutely need concurrency in order to deliver your samples to the GPU fast enough.

The current workarounds to make this happen in python are quite ugly imho, e.g. Pytorch spawns multiple python processes and then pushes data between the processes through shared memory, which incurs quite some overhead. Tensorflow on the other hand requires you to stick to their Tensor-dsl so that it can run within their graph engine. If native concurrency were a thing, data loading would be much more straightforward to implement without such hacks.

[substation13]

Yes, it can be.

1. Loading data

2. Running algorithms that benefit from shared memory

3. Serving the model (if it's not being output to some portable format)

There are also general benefits of using one language across a project. Because Python is weak on these things, we end up using multiple languages.

[not-my-account]

You end up having to do a lot of things in a ML training run, some of which you can do in parallel because it’s not important now (eg saving metadata) or because you’d otherwise be resource limited (eg loading data and formatting batches for training)

[itronitron]

Concurrency generally makes things run faster. If you test your ML methods your tests will complete faster if the ML methods are able to use and take advantage of concurrency. Some people consider that useful.

[formulathree]

No, parallelism is useful, concurrency without parallelism is not useful.

Go and elixir provide some parallelism but the primary focus for both languages is concurrency.

[throwawaymaths]

It's not. Until you need to deploy it.

[antupis]

yes but generally they are not that kind make or break type issues like eg Julia correctness problems.

[beeburrt]

Correctness problems? Could you expand on that? Not doubting, just curious. Thnx