c++ - How to stop TensorFlow from multi-threading

Question

I am writing code for NIST FRVT. NIST wants the program to run at max 2 threads(Only CPU, No GPU). I am using TensorFlow in my code but it always spawns much more than 2 threads. I tried this solution. It decreased the number of threads, but not up to 2

I'm getting this warning

[WARNING] We've detected that your software may be threading or using other multiprocessing techniques during template creation. The number of threads detected was 9 and it should be 2. Per the API document, implementations must run single-threaded. In the test environment, there is no advantage to threading, because NIST will distribute workload across multiple blades and multiple processes. We highly recommend that you fix this issue prior to submission.

NIST is calculating threads by top -H -b -n1 | grep validate11 | wc -l

Is there any way to force TensorFlow to use at max 2 threads?

Is there any TensorFlow version that will run on 2 threads?

(It is because of TensorFlow, I checked by removing TensorFlow part from the code)

tensorflow version 1.8.0

opencv version 3.4.1

g++ version 4.8.5

g++ -std=c++11

Answer 1

With reference to the following sources, it looks like there is no possibility to run TensorFlow on 1 or 2 threads.

• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/33627
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/42510
• https://github.com/theislab/batchglm/issues/27
• Using the script variable OMP_NUM_THREADS in the program source files
• Change number of threads for Tensorflow inference with C API

I submitted my implementation of NIST-FRVT having more than 6 threads, and NIST accepted that. Only 1 out of 6 threads were running and the rest of the threads were in sleeping mode.