Meta tensors, but without code deduplication (#38490)
Summary:
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/38490
A meta tensor is a tensor that is a lot like a normal tensor,
except it doesn't actually have any data associated with it.
You can use them to carry out shape/dtype computations without
actually having to run the actual code; for example, this could
be used to do shape inference in a JIT analysis pass.
Check out the description in DispatchKey.h for more information.
Meta tensors are part of a larger project to rationalize how we
write kernels so that we don't have to duplicate shape logic
in CPU kernel, CUDA kernel and meta kernel (this PR makes the
duplication problem worse!) However, that infrastructure can
be built on top of this proof of concept, which just shows how
you can start writing meta kernels today even without this
infrastructure.
There are a lot of things that don't work:
- I special cased printing for dense tensors only; if you try to
allocate a meta sparse / quantized tensor things aren't going
to work.
- The printing formula implies that torch.tensor() can take an
ellipsis, but I didn't add this.
- I wrote an example formula for binary operators, but it isn't
even right! (It doesn't do type promotion of memory layout
correctly). The most future proof way to do it right is to
factor out the relevant computation out of TensorIterator,
as it is quite involved.
- Nothing besides torch.add works right now
- Meta functions are ALWAYS included in mobile builds (selective
build doesn't work on them). This isn't a big deal for now
but will become more pressing as more meta functions are added.
One reason I'm putting up this PR now is to check with Yinghai Lu
if we can unblock shape inference for accelerators, while we are
still working on a long term plan for how to unify all shape
computation across our kernels.
Signed-off-by: Edward Z. Yang <ezyang@fb.com>
Test Plan: Imported from OSS
Differential Revision: D21935609
Pulled By: ezyang
fbshipit-source-id: f7d8636eeb8516b6bc296db99a16e56029972eee
