MNIST Training using PyTorch and Step Functions

Background

MNIST is a widely used dataset for handwritten digit classification. It consists of 70,000 labeled 28x28 pixel grayscale images of hand-written digits. The dataset is split into 60,000 training images and 10,000 test images. There are 10 classes (one for each of the 10 digits). This tutorial will show how to train and test an MNIST model on SageMaker using PyTorch.

For more information about PyTorch in SageMaker, please visit sagemaker-pytorch-containers and sagemaker-python-sdk github repositories.

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import sys
!{sys.executable} -m pip install --upgrade stepfunctions

Setup

Add a policy to your SageMaker role in IAM

If you are running this notebook on an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance, the IAM role assumed by your notebook instance needs permission to create and run workflows in AWS Step Functions. To provide this permission to the role, do the following.

  1. Open the Amazon SageMaker console.

  2. Select Notebook instances and choose the name of your notebook instance

  3. Under Permissions and encryption select the role ARN to view the role on the IAM console

  4. Choose Attach policies and search for AWSStepFunctionsFullAccess.

  5. Select the check box next to AWSStepFunctionsFullAccess and choose Attach policy

If you are running this notebook in a local environment, the SDK will use your configured AWS CLI configuration. For more information, see Configuring the AWS CLI.

Next, create an execution role in IAM for Step Functions.

Create an execution role for Step Functions

You need an execution role so that you can create and execute workflows in Step Functions.

  1. Go to the IAM console

  2. Select Roles and then Create role.

  3. Under Choose the service that will use this role select Step Functions

  4. Choose Next until you can enter a Role name

  5. Enter a name such as StepFunctionsWorkflowExecutionRole and then select Create role

Attach a policy to the role you created. The following steps attach a policy that provides full access to Step Functions, however as a good practice you should only provide access to the resources you need.

  1. Under the Permissions tab, click Add inline policy

  2. Enter the following in the JSON tab

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "sagemaker:CreateTransformJob",
                "sagemaker:DescribeTransformJob",
                "sagemaker:StopTransformJob",
                "sagemaker:CreateTrainingJob",
                "sagemaker:DescribeTrainingJob",
                "sagemaker:StopTrainingJob",
                "sagemaker:CreateHyperParameterTuningJob",
                "sagemaker:DescribeHyperParameterTuningJob",
                "sagemaker:StopHyperParameterTuningJob",
                "sagemaker:CreateModel",
                "sagemaker:CreateEndpointConfig",
                "sagemaker:CreateEndpoint",
                "sagemaker:DeleteEndpointConfig",
                "sagemaker:DeleteEndpoint",
                "sagemaker:UpdateEndpoint",
                "sagemaker:ListTags",
                "lambda:InvokeFunction",
                "sqs:SendMessage",
                "sns:Publish",
                "ecs:RunTask",
                "ecs:StopTask",
                "ecs:DescribeTasks",
                "dynamodb:GetItem",
                "dynamodb:PutItem",
                "dynamodb:UpdateItem",
                "dynamodb:DeleteItem",
                "batch:SubmitJob",
                "batch:DescribeJobs",
                "batch:TerminateJob",
                "glue:StartJobRun",
                "glue:GetJobRun",
                "glue:GetJobRuns",
                "glue:BatchStopJobRun"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "iam:PassRole"
            ],
            "Resource": "*",
            "Condition": {
                "StringEquals": {
                    "iam:PassedToService": "sagemaker.amazonaws.com"
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "events:PutTargets",
                "events:PutRule",
                "events:DescribeRule"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:events:*:*:rule/StepFunctionsGetEventsForSageMakerTrainingJobsRule",
                "arn:aws:events:*:*:rule/StepFunctionsGetEventsForSageMakerTransformJobsRule",
                "arn:aws:events:*:*:rule/StepFunctionsGetEventsForSageMakerTuningJobsRule",
                "arn:aws:events:*:*:rule/StepFunctionsGetEventsForECSTaskRule",
                "arn:aws:events:*:*:rule/StepFunctionsGetEventsForBatchJobsRule"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

  1. Choose Review policy and give the policy a name such as StepFunctionsWorkflowExecutionPolicy

  2. Choose Create policy. You will be redirected to the details page for the role.

  3. Copy the Role ARN at the top of the Summary

Import the required modules

Now import the required modules from the Step Functions SDK and AWS SageMaker, configure an S3 bucket, and get the AWS SageMaker execution role.

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import sagemaker
import stepfunctions
import logging

from stepfunctions.template.pipeline import TrainingPipeline

sagemaker_session = sagemaker.Session()
stepfunctions.set_stream_logger(level=logging.INFO)

bucket = sagemaker_session.default_bucket()
prefix = 'sagemaker/DEMO-pytorch-mnist'

# SageMaker Execution Role
# You can use sagemaker.get_execution_role() if running inside sagemaker's notebook instance
sagemaker_execution_role = sagemaker.get_execution_role() #Replace with ARN if not in an AWS SageMaker notebook

# paste the StepFunctionsWorkflowExecutionRole ARN from above
workflow_execution_role = "<execution-role-arn>"

Data

Getting the data

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from torchvision import datasets, transforms

datasets.MNIST('data', download=True, transform=transforms.Compose([
    transforms.ToTensor(),
    transforms.Normalize((0.1307,), (0.3081,))
]))

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inputs = sagemaker_session.upload_data(path='data', bucket=bucket, key_prefix=prefix)
print('input spec (in this case, just an S3 path): {}'.format(inputs))

Uploading the data to S3

We are going to use the sagemaker.Session.upload_data function to upload our datasets to an S3 location. The return value inputs identifies the location – we will use later when we start the training job.

Train

Training script

The mnist.py script provides all the code we need for training and hosting a SageMaker model (model_fn function to load a model). The training script is very similar to a training script you might run outside of SageMaker, but you can access useful properties about the training environment through various environment variables, such as:

  • SM_MODEL_DIR: A string representing the path to the directory to write model artifacts to. These artifacts are uploaded to S3 for model hosting.

  • SM_NUM_GPUS: The number of gpus available in the current container.

  • SM_CURRENT_HOST: The name of the current container on the container network.

  • SM_HOSTS: JSON encoded list containing all the hosts .

Supposing one input channel, ‘training’, was used in the call to the PyTorch estimator’s fit() method, the following will be set, following the format SM_CHANNEL_[channel_name]:

  • SM_CHANNEL_TRAINING: A string representing the path to the directory containing data in the ‘training’ channel.

For more information about training environment variables, please visit SageMaker Containers.

A typical training script loads data from the input channels, configures training with hyperparameters, trains a model, and saves a model to model_dir so that it can be hosted later. Hyperparameters are passed to your script as arguments and can be retrieved with an argparse.ArgumentParser instance.

Because the SageMaker imports the training script, you should put your training code in a main guard (if __name__=='__main__':) if you are using the same script to host your model as we do in this example, so that SageMaker does not inadvertently run your training code at the wrong point in execution.

For example, the script run by this notebook:

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!pygmentize mnist.py

Use Step Functions to run training in SageMaker

The PyTorch class allows us to run our training function as a training job on SageMaker. We need to configure it with our training script, an IAM role, the number of training instances, the training instance type, and hyperparameters. In this case we are going to run our training job on 2 ml.c4.xlarge instances. But this example can be ran on one or multiple, cpu or gpu instances (full list of available instances). The hyperparameters parameter is a dict of values that will be passed to your training script – you can see how to access these values in the mnist.py script above.

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from sagemaker.pytorch import PyTorch

estimator = PyTorch(entry_point='mnist.py',
                    role=sagemaker_execution_role,
                    framework_version='1.2.0',
                    train_instance_count=2,
                    train_instance_type='ml.c4.xlarge',
                    hyperparameters={
                        'epochs': 6,
                        'backend': 'gloo'
                    })

Build a training pipeline with the Step Functions SDK

A typical task for a data scientist is to train a model and deploy that model to an endpoint. Without the Step Functions SDK, this is a four step process on SageMaker that includes the following.

  1. Training the model

  2. Creating the model on SageMaker

  3. Creating an endpoint configuration

  4. Deploying the trained model to the configured endpoint

The Step Functions SDK provides the TrainingPipeline API to simplify this procedure. The following configures pipeline with the necessary parameters to define a training pipeline.

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pipeline = TrainingPipeline(
    estimator=estimator,
    role=workflow_execution_role,
    inputs=inputs,
    s3_bucket=bucket
)

Visualize the pipeline

You can now view the workflow definition, and also visualize it as a graph. This workflow and graph represent your training pipeline.

View the workflow definition

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print(pipeline.workflow.definition.to_json(pretty=True))

Visualize the workflow graph

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pipeline.render_graph()

Create and execute the pipeline on AWS Step Functions

Create the pipeline in AWS Step Functions with create.

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pipeline.create()

Run the workflow with execute. A link will be provided after the following cell is executed. Following this link, you can monitor your pipeline execution on Step Functions’ console.

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pipeline.execute()