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Create a custom op for any model

MAX is designed to be fully extensible, so you can get the behavior you want from your model, without any compromises in performance. That means you can extend MAX Engine's capabilities by defining high-performance custom operations ("ops") for your model. On this page, we’ll show you how to implement a new op for MAX Engine and use it with an ONNX model, step by step.

When you write a custom op in Mojo, the MAX Engine compiler treats it the same as all the other ops (”kernels”) that we’ve built into MAX Engine—the compiler will analyze and optimize your op to achieve the best performance. You can learn more about how it works in the intro to MAX extensibility.

The procedure is basically two steps:

  1. Write your op as a Mojo function that operates on Tensor values, and package it.
  2. When you load your model, also load your op package (for example, with the Python load() function).

Let's do it!

Limitations

Currently, custom ops are compatible with ONNX and MAX Graph models only. Support for TorchScript models is coming soon. (If you're using MAX Graph, instead see Create a custom op in MAX Graph).

Also, the example code below currently fails on Ubuntu 20.04.

Overview​

When MAX compiles a TorchScript or ONNX model, it translates each op in the graph into “MO” dialect operations. The MO dialect is an intermediate representation we use in the our MLIR-based compiler graph compiler (”MO” is for “Modular”). This means we’ve defined a lot of graph operations in MO that map to other framework ops, such as add, matmul, and softmax. But there are a lot of ops out there (PyTorch has thousands), most of which are rarely used and currently not implemented in MAX.

If you’re using a TorchScript model and the MAX compiler encounters one of these ops that we haven’t implemented, it falls back to using the op implementation from PyTorch. This is a good thing because it means we can provide full compatibility with nearly all PyTorch models, without any need for custom ops. (Currently, you can't implement custom ops for a PyTorch model anyways, but that's in development.)

On the other hand, if your ONNX model uses an op we haven’t implemented in MAX, the compiler fails because ONNX models cannot fall back to the op implementation from ONNX. In this case, you can fix it by implementing the op in Mojo. That’s exactly what you’ll learn to do below.

We're going to implement the Det op for MAX Engine. Currently, MAX Engine doesn't have an implementation for this op, so it will fail when trying to compile an ONNX model that uses it. (Whereas, you can compile a TorchScript model that uses Det, because MAX Engine falls back to the PyTorch implementation.)

Set up​

First, make sure you have the latest version of MAX.

For this tutorial, we're going to use some example code in our max GitHub repo. If you haven't already, clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/modularml/max.git && cd examples/extensibility

And create a virtual environment with the required dependencies:

python3.11 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install --find-links $(modular config max.path)/wheels max-engine

Build the ONNX model​

Initially, the ONNX model doesn't work. Here's how to build it and see for yourself that it fails to compile with MAX Engine:

  1. Build the model with this script:

    python3 onnx-model.py

  2. Try running it with the benchmark tool:

    max benchmark onnx_det.onnx

    This will fail with an error:

    loc("onnx_det.onnx":0:0): error: failed to legalize operation 'monnx.det_v11' that was explicitly marked illegal

As the error indicates, MAX Engine cannot compile the det_v11 op.

Now let’s implement that op for MAX Engine so the model works.

The custom op function we need already exists in the GitHub repo, but if you want to build it yourself as practice, create a new directory and copy the ONNX model you just built:

mkdir my_project && mv onnx_det.onnx my_project && cd my_project

Implement a custom op​

To create a custom op for MAX Engine, you need to create a Mojo package that includes the code for your op.

Start by creating a directory to use as the Mojo package, and create a file named det.mojo inside:

mkdir custom_ops && touch custom_ops/det.mojo

Then write the function, following these rules:

  • The function must operate on Tensor values: it must take a Tensor argument for each op input and return a Tensor as the op output.

  • You must register your function as an op by adding the register.op() decorator with the name of your op as an argument.

For example, see the following code—you can copy and paste this into your det.mojo file. Notice the name we give to register.op() is the name from the above compiler error ("monnx.det_v11"):

det.mojo
from python import Python
from .python_utils import tensor_to_numpy, numpy_to_tensor
from max import register
from max.extensibility import Tensor, empty_tensor

@register.op("monnx.det_v11")
fn det[type: DType, rank: Int](x: Tensor[type, rank]) -> Tensor[type, rank - 2]:
    try:
        print("Hello, custom DET!")
        var np = Python.import_module("numpy")
        var np_array = tensor_to_numpy(x, np)
        var np_out = np.linalg.det(np_array)
        return numpy_to_tensor[type, rank - 2](np_out)
    except e:
        print(e)
    return empty_tensor[type, rank - 2](0)

Although we could have written the determinant ("det") function entirely in Mojo, we don't have to because Mojo allows us to lazily use the NumPy implementation. This requires that we convert NumPy arrays to/from Tensor values. Our code does that using tensor_to_numpy() and numpy_to_tensor(), which come from the python_utils module in our GitHub code example.

For the sake of this tutorial, create a file named python_utils.mojo right next to your det.mojo file and copy-paste the contents of python_utils.mojo.

Now the custom op is ready to go.

Package the custom op​

To package the custom op, add an empty __init__.mojo file in the custom_ops directory. Then, pass that directory name to the mojo package command.

For example, here's a look in our custom_ops directory:

custom_ops
├── __init__.mojo
├── det.mojo
└── python_utils.mojo

Now package it with this command:

mojo package custom_ops

This creates a file called custom_ops.mojopkg in the current directory.

Next, you simply load the ONNX model with this Mojo package.

Benchmark with the custom op​

To quickly verify the custom op works, pass the model and the Mojo package to the max benchmark command:

max benchmark onnx_det.onnx --custom-ops-path=custom_ops.mojopkg

Execute the model with the custom op​

Finally, here’s how to use the Python API to load the model and the custom op. All you need to do is add the custom_ops_path argument when you call load().

So, create a file named onnx-inference.py in the my_project directory, and paste in this code:

onnx-inference.py
from max import engine
import numpy as np

session = engine.InferenceSession()
model = session.load("onnx_det.onnx", custom_ops_path="custom_ops.mojopkg")

for tensor in model.input_metadata:
    print(f'name: {tensor.name}, shape: {tensor.shape}, dtype: {tensor.dtype}')

input_x = np.random.rand(3, 3, 5).astype(np.float32)
input_a = np.random.rand(5, 3).astype(np.float32)
input_b = np.random.rand(3).astype(np.float32)

result = model.execute(X=input_x, A=input_a, B=input_b)
print(result)

That’s it!

Now run it:

python3 onnx-inference.py
Compiling model...
Done!
name: X, shape: [3, 3, 5], dtype: DType.float32
name: A, shape: [5, 3], dtype: DType.float32
name: B, shape: [3], dtype: DType.float32
Hello, custom DET!
{'Z': array([-0.04415698, -0.00949615,  0.07051321], dtype=float32)}

You can get all the example code from this and previous sections from our GitHub repo.

Add a custom op to Triton (optional)​

If you're using NVIDIA's Triton Inference Server to deploy your model, you can make your custom op available by appending the following to your model configuration file:

parameters: [{
  key: "custom-ops-path"
  value: {
    string_value:"./path/to/custom_ops.mojopkg"
  }
}]

You must include the key-value pair inside the parameters configuration, as shown above. The only thing you need to change is the string_value so it specifies the path to your custom ops Mojo package.

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