Improvements to DynamicPPLBenchmarks

[torfjelde]

Produces results such as can be seen here: #309 (comment)

[yebai]

This might be helpful for running benchmarks via CI - https://github.com/tkf/BenchmarkCI.jl

[yebai]

@torfjelde should we improve this PR by incorporating TuringBenchmarks ? Alternatively, we can move all benchmarking code here into TuringBenchmarks . I am happy with both cases, but ideally, these benchmarking utilities should live in only one place to minimise confusion.

Also, https://github.com/TuringLang/TuringExamples contains some very old benchmarking code.

cc @xukai92 @devmotion

[coveralls]

Pull Request Test Coverage Report for Build 5458519079

• 0 of 0 changed or added relevant lines in 0 files are covered.
• No unchanged relevant lines lost coverage.
• Overall coverage remained the same at 76.408%

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Totals
Change from base Build 5358326778:	0.0%
Covered Lines:	1927
Relevant Lines:	2522

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💛 - Coveralls

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Patch and project coverage have no change.

Comparison is base (e6dd4ef) 76.40% compared to head (c867ae8) 76.40%.

Additional details and impacted files

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  Misses        595      595           

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[yebai]

We could implement a setup similar to EnzymeAD/Reactant.jl#105 (comment)

[shravanngoswamii]

I will look into this soon!

[torfjelde]

I think there are few different things we need to address:

• How to set up the benchmarks for a given Model. This is already taken care of in TuringBenchmarking.jl; if anything is missing, we should just contribute to that, since this is also useful for end-users.
• How do we track and compare benchmarks across versions?
• How do we present in the information? Do we use Weave docs like in this PR or do we just present stuff in a table?
• Which models should we benchmark?
  • Might want to look at https://github.com/JasonPekos/TuringPosteriorDB.jl.
  • We should also benchmark different implementations of the same model, so we can see how the different "types" of approaches are affected by changes we make.
• Should the benchmarking be part of the CI? If so, how should this be triggered? How do we get compute for this (we can't just use a standard GH action for this but will need our "own" server to run this on)?

IMO, the CI stuff is not really that crucial. The most important things are a) choose a suite of models that answers all the questions we want, e.g. how does changes we make affect different impls of a model, how is scaling wrt. number of parameters affacted, how are compilation times affect, etc., and b) what's the output format for all of this.

[torfjelde]

How do we present in the information? Do we use Weave docs like in this PR or do we just present stuff in a table?

Some further notes on this. IMO we're mainly interested in a few different "experiments". We don't want to be testing every model out there, and so there are things we want to "answer" with our benchmarks.

As a result, I'm leaning more towards a Weave approach with each notebook containing answering a distinct question, e.g. "how does the model scale with number of observations", which subsequently produces outputs that can be compared across versions somehow. That is, I think the overall approach taken in this PR is "correct", but we need to make it much nicer + update how the benchmarks are performed.

But then the question is: what are the "questions" we want to answer. Here's few I can think of:

1. How does performance vary across implementations, going from "everything uses for-loops" to "everything is vectorized"?
2. How does both runtime performance and compilation times scale wrt. number of parameters and observations?

[shravanngoswamii]

How do we track and compare benchmarks across versions?

We can store html of benchmarks.md with some setup of different versions in gh-pages and serve it on /benchmarks

How do we present in the information? Do we use Weave docs like in this PR or do we just present stuff in a table?

Weave approach looks fine as each notebook could address a specific questions!

Should the benchmarking be part of the CI? If so, how should this be triggered? How do we get compute for this (we can't just use a standard GH action for this but will need our "own" server to run this on)?

It took a lot of time to run benchmarks from this PR locally, so I guess GH action is not preferred for this!

Let me know what to do next, I will proceed as you say!

[shravanngoswamii]

Might want to look at https://github.com/JasonPekos/TuringPosteriorDB.jl.

I have looked into this, there are many models, we must figure out which ones to benchmark.