See below for the notes from the two most recent Core Maintainers meetings.
Core Maintainers Meeting March 24th, 2023
Considered Module Maintainer Nominations
- [specific examples redacted]
- Summary: Considered 4 new module maintainers.
- Accepted two. Notification on these will be through a post on dev-discuss within the next few days.
- Did not accept two. Feedback to these nominees and nominators will be provided privately.
- Other discussion related to module maintainers:
- Looking at the areas it was decided that several maintainers were not active any more and it was decided to move them to emeritus status.
- There was some discussion about the granularity of the various module areas around compiler and various hardware back-ends.
- The taxonomy seems out of date, we should update it given the new PT2 compiler architecture.
- Proposal:
Old module taxonomy: Compilers, CPU Performance, Intel/MKLDNN
New module taxonomy:
- Compiler Front End (includes Dynamo, FX),
- CPU Performance (includes inductor, MKLDNN, LLVM),
- GPU Performance (includes inductor, OpenAI Triton)
Considered one new Core Maintainer Nomination
- [specific example redacted]
- Summary: Accepted the new core maintainer.
- Notification will come separately.
Is there an essential competitive threat in the popularity of Transformers and how should PyTorch react? [Agenda item added day-of-meeting]
- What if transformers are the end of model architecture innovation?
- Does something narrow end up dominating
- Unlikely, but what if…
- Generality would be a less important differentiation for PyTorch among frameworks and other runtimes.
- Would need to focus more on out of the box large scale training performance and scalability
- Possible goal: Can PyTorch deliver SOTA Training perf and scalability out of the box?
- Can we do this in a multi-vendor way?
- This is about both the transformer architecture but also seamless scaling to cutting edge scales.
- PyTorch Distributed, FSDP, 3D parallelism
- Some vendors are is pushing vertically integrated solutions hardware up to user level APIs.
- We would need to paint the picture of a platform independent E2E system and get folks excited.
- We have lots of the pieces but out of the box composability across all the components in the pytorch ecosystem is lacking – that will be critical.
- Decision: Greg, Dima, and Soumith to work on this as a small group.
Should we add Safe Tensor support to PyTorch?
[Agenda item added day-of-meeting]
- Safe tensors drop Views and don’t support complex nested types.
- UX challenges … means we have two formats
- Can we improve PT native serialization instead?
- Having a lightweight C++ API in core (not tied to JIT) is a good idea
- Nested types are rare but views are pretty core.
- Decision: rejected based on coverage, complexity, and composability.
Core Maintainers Meeting October 2022
Distinction between PR review policies and maintainers
- Do reviewers have a special role?
- Are maintainers responsible for more than reviewing?
- Nominate people with no voting power but only power to review?
- Might be useful for areas with review shortage, e.g. CPU/Backend
- Decision: if a person has track record of doing things properly, they should also be trusted to be a module maintainer
- Aim to expand maintainership in understaffed areas
Decision: Reject
Discuss nomination of an additional maintainer
- [Specific example redacted]
- When we want to add someone as a maintainer of a module, they need to
- have shown to have reviewed things/PRs, take the module forward
- triaging issues correctly, maintain high bar quality
- responsible and qualified angle for that module
- “Promotion should be trailing”
- Commits going forward to actively maintain module
- How to handle requests for submissions?
- Person needs to know enough about what’s going on to make decision as is
- Need comms from folks that are not in this meeting
- When we get a nomination, can discuss evidence over a private google doc, or discuss over email
Decision: Nomination not approved.
“What are the qualification criteria for a contributor to become a maintainer?”
- Make doc less vague or not? We have doc in governance section of the website
- It’s quite difficult to hit the bar of a contributor/maintainer, if you don’t have access e.g. you can join only composability meetings if you’re part of Meta.
- Give people access and opportunity
- Information flow is an issue (invite only). Break out of the cycle of internal FB discussions only
- Should be a federated responsibility to plug in and involve other people. E.g. TorchVision people constantly involve people not at Meta.
- Escalation for special situations is also possible
- Existing maintainers should be incentivized already to create more maintainers, creating features and parallelizing review load
- Responsibilities?
- Do they need to host monthly public roadmap meetings? Maintain mailing lists?
- Maintainers need to meet quarterly for roadmap discussion to align with release cycle, join in once every release for retrospective
- Provide requirements, and discuss state of the module
Decision: No action was taken. This is an ongoing discussion among the core maintainers.
What to include or redact from minutes of maintainership from this meeting
Decision: Maintainers to review notes and decide what to share with OSS community. Primarily redact personal information about nominations.
Discuss proposal for code review tiers
- Core reviewers sounds good
- Should we add more core reviewers?
- Yes
- Have a core reviewers section, and more broad definition
- We only want it to be more broad during transition period
- Move maintainers to correct subprojects
- Create a list of people keep the lights on
- Decision is based on time working on PyTorch
- Stamp commits
- People will not be able to merge things as is today, [AI] open up merge rules?
Decision: Assigned some follow up actions.
Open AI:
- Remove metamates special privileges
- Make sure merge rules.json are in sync with module structure
Requests from vendors to add types (into pytorch core) i.e. FP8 (nvidia)
- [AI] Ask AO people to review/develop FP8 . Have a 1hr meeting of what they will send as a PR
- Gregory Chanan to be looped in for these high bandwidth discussion (add Edward Yang)
- There are 2 FP8s, Separate dtypes
Decision: Use the normal RFC / Design review process.
- Follow up: This work is ongoing. See [wip] add the torch.float8_e4m3fn data type by vkuzo · Pull Request #97798 · pytorch/pytorch · GitHub for the latest proposal.