Does TFF serializalize functions of another library?

Question

I'm planning a TFF scheme in which the clients send to the sever data besides the weights, like their hardware information (e.g CPU frequency). To achieve that, I need to call functions of third-party python libraries, like psutils. Is it possible to serialize (using tff.tf_computation) such kind of functions? If not, what could be a solution to achieve this objective in a scenario where I'm using a remote executor setting through gRPC?

Answer 1

Unfortunately no, this does not work without modification. TFF uses TensorFlow graphs to serialize the computation logic to run on remote machines. TFF does not interpret Python code on the remote machines.

There maybe a solution by creating a TensorFlow custom op. This would mean writing C++ code to retrieve CPU frequency, and then a Python API to add the operation to the TensorFlow graph during computation construction. TensorFlow's guide for Create an op can provide detailed instructions.