I have installed PyTorch on several different machines, and I am consistently seeing the OS X CPU-only performance outperforming PyTorch on other platforms, even though the other machines have better CPUs.
I was using this post as a point of reference, as the symptoms sound similar. However, I ultimately found that while installing with the iomp5 flag (which now appears to be integrated into the master branch) does indeed produce faster matrix multiplication on the server, overall performance still seems to be slower.
My target application is kind of a monster, so my first step at isolating the issue was trying out some of the PyTorch examples 9. For example, I ran the mnist example on two different machines, and the example finished 10 epochs almost twice as fast on my MacBook Pro than on the server. Here are the specifications for each machine (very similar to the post linked above):
macOS: Sierra, CPU: Intel i7-4770HQ (8) @ 2.20GHz, 16GB RAM
CentOS 7.0, CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2695v2 (48) @ 2.40GHz, 384GB RAM
I tried installing with conda and from source, but the results are the same.
Has anyone seen similar behavior?
What would be some useful further steps to isolate the cause of the performance differences?
Are there more useful benchmarking scripts to use?
Thanks.