thanks for bringing this topic up, Kellen!
It would indeed be great if we could make sure to have reproducible results
indepent of the concrete device id someone is using.
Just a thought: How about decoupling the seeding from the concrete device ids
while still allowing a different seed for
This is what I was asking about:
https://www.unix.com/man-page/POSIX/3posix/random/
POSIX standard stating that given a seed, the output must be deterministic.
On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 7:58 AM, kellen sunderland <
kellen.sunderl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your question
I think the convention is that random generators in most modern languages
are always seeded, and always deterministic. If a user seed isn't
supplied, implementations generally provide their own seed, which they
attempt to make unique. Often they generate a seed that takes into account
the
wait wait — i don’t think that random number generators should return
deterministic lists of numbers. i’m asking if something says it’s supposed
to. i know they tend to, but my understanding is that they tend to because
of the challenge of generating true random numbers from hardware. IMHO the
Thanks Asmus, yes this is also the approach I would be in favour of. I
think we should optionally allow the user to specify if they want
deterministic behaviour independent of the GPU they run on. If MXNet is
going to support more arbitrary linear algabra operations I could see a lot
of use
The issue is tricky. Number generators should return deterministic sets of
numbers as Chris said, but that usually only applies to non-distributed
systems. And to some extend, we have already a distributed system as soon as
one cpu and one gpu is involved.
For the usual setup like distributed
Is it explicitly defined somewhere that random number generators should
always return a deterministic set of numbers given the same seed, or is
that just a side-effect of some hardware not having a better way to
generate random numbers so they use a user-defined seed to kick off the
randomization
