RL-Scope: Cross-Stack Profiling for Deep Reinforcement Learning Workloads

In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated groundbreaking results in robotics, datacenter management, and many other applications. Despite its increasing popularity, there has been little work in understanding system-level bottlenecks in RL workloads. Instead, the common implicit assumption is that RL workloads are similar to classic supervised learning (SL) workloads. Our analysis contradicts this assumption and shows operations considered GPU-heavy in SL spend at most 12.9% of time GPU-bound in RL workloads, with the rest CPU-bound in different layers of the software stack running high-level language code and non-compute code such as ML backend and CUDA API calls. To explain where training time is spent in RL workloads, we propose RL-Scope: an accurate cross-stack profiler that supports multiple ML backends and simulators. In contrast to existing profilers that are limited to a single layer of the software and hardware stack, RL-Scope collects profiling information across the entire stack and scopes it to high-level operations, providing developers and researchers with a complete picture of RL training time. We demonstrate RL-Scope’s utility through several in-depth case studies. First, we compare RL frameworks to quantify the effects of fundamental design choices behind ML backends. For example, we use RL-Scope to measure and explain a 2.3× difference in runtime between equivalent PyTorch and TensorFlow algorithm implementations, and to identify a bottleneck rooted in overly-abstracted algorithm implementations. Next, we survey how training bottlenecks change as we consider different simulators and RL algorithms, and show that on-policy algorithms are at least 3.5× more simulation-bound than off-policy algorithms. Finally, we profile a scale-up workload and demonstrate that GPU utilization metrics reported by commonly-used tools dramatically inflate GPU usage, whereas RL-Scope reports true GPU-bound time. RL-Scope is an open-source tool available at https://github.com/UofT-EcoSystem/rlscope.