Hey, nice to see this here! I'm the primary author so happy to answer any questions you might have!
Fault Tolerant Llama training
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Fault Tolerant Llama training
#12Hey, nice to see this here! I'm the primary author so happy to answer any questions you might have!
Why isnt there more investments into semi-synchronous training - is it that the convergence is iffy ? Also, it would be great to refactor this code into a typed language, so it is easier to reason about and maintain.
Historically it's been limited to areas like federated learning for low power/low network training but with the massive increase in number of GPUs it's becoming relevant even for training in datacenters.
It is another variable ML researchers have to tune so does add some complexity and I expect most folks just aren't familiar with it yet.
On "typed language": all of torchft is typed! The coordination/quorum layers are written in Rust w/ GRPC and the front-end is typed Python with Pyre since it has to interact with PyTorch and model code.
Re: Fault Tolerant Llama training
#13This is awesome, can’t wait to try out these techniques. At least a week a year of my time for the past few years has gone towards recovering from a fault crashing a training run. Sometimes environment related, sometimes shared storage, sometimes just because a slightly faulty IB cable.
Re: Fault Tolerant Llama training
#14What kind of failures are you typically concerned with here?
For specific types of failures check out the section on "Reliability and Operational Challenges" from the Llama 3 paper https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-o...
Re: Fault Tolerant Llama training
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why isnt there more investments into semi-synchronous training - is it that the convergence is iffy ? Also, it would be great to refactor this code into a typed language, so it is easier to reason about and maintain.
Recently there's been a lot of interest and improvements in semi-synchronous training. The Streaming DiLoCo paper came out this year and is a big step forward for datacenter semi-sync. Historically it's been limited to areas like federated learning for low power/low network training but with the massive increase in number of GPUs it's becoming relevant even for training in datacenters. It is another variable ML resea…
[1] https://github.com/pytorch-labs/monarch/issues/175#issuecomm...
Re: Fault Tolerant Llama training
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently there's been a lot of interest and improvements in semi-synchronous training. The Streaming DiLoCo paper came out this year and is a big step forward for datacenter semi-sync. Historically it's been limited to areas like federated learning for low power/low network training but with the massive increase in number of GPUs it's becoming relevant even for training in datacenters. It is another variable ML resea…
thanks !, I am curious how this relates to the recent "monarch" announcement - which has similar goals of facilitating large scale fault tolerant training [1]. [1] https://github.com/pytorch-labs/monarch/issues/175#issuecomm...