Using XGBoost with RAPIDS Memory Manager (RMM) plugin (EXPERIMENTAL)
====================================================================
[RAPIDS Memory Manager (RMM)](https://github.com/rapidsai/rmm) library provides a collection of
efficient memory allocators for NVIDIA GPUs. It is now possible to use XGBoost with memory
allocators provided by RMM, by enabling the RMM integration plugin.

The demos in this directory highlights one RMM allocator in particular: **the pool sub-allocator**.
This allocator addresses the slow speed of `cudaMalloc()` by allocating a large chunk of memory
upfront. Subsequent allocations will draw from the pool of already allocated memory and thus avoid
the overhead of calling `cudaMalloc()` directly. See
[this GTC talk slides](https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2015/presentation/S5530-Stephen-Jones.pdf)
for more details.

Before running the demos, ensure that XGBoost is compiled with the RMM plugin enabled. To do this,
run CMake with option `-DPLUGIN_RMM=ON` (`-DUSE_CUDA=ON` also required):
```
cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DUSE_NCCL=ON -DPLUGIN_RMM=ON
make -j4
```
CMake will attempt to locate the RMM library in your build environment. You may choose to build
RMM from the source, or install it using the Conda package manager. If CMake cannot find RMM, you
should specify the location of RMM with the CMake prefix:
```
# If using Conda:
cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DUSE_NCCL=ON -DPLUGIN_RMM=ON -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$CONDA_PREFIX
# If using RMM installed with a custom location
cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DUSE_NCCL=ON -DPLUGIN_RMM=ON -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/rmm
```

# Informing XGBoost about RMM pool

When XGBoost is compiled with RMM, most of the large size allocation will go through RMM
allocators, but some small allocations in performance critical areas are using a different
caching allocator so that we can have better control over memory allocation behavior.
Users can override this behavior and force the use of rmm for all allocations by setting
the global configuration ``use_rmm``:

``` python
with xgb.config_context(use_rmm=True):
    clf = xgb.XGBClassifier(tree_method="gpu_hist")
```

Depending on the choice of memory pool size or type of allocator, this may have negative
performance impact.

* [Using RMM with a single GPU](./rmm_singlegpu.py)
* [Using RMM with a local Dask cluster consisting of multiple GPUs](./rmm_mgpu_with_dask.py)