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Fully Sharded Data Parallel in PyTorch XLA

Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) in PyTorch XLA is a utility for sharding Module parameters across data-parallel workers.

Example usage:

import torch
import torch_xla.core.xla_model as xm
import torch_xla.runtime as xr
from torch_xla.distributed.fsdp import XlaFullyShardedDataParallel as FSDP

model = FSDP(my_module)
optim = torch.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.0001)
output = model(x, y)
loss = output.sum()
loss.backward()
optim.step()

It is also possible to shard individual layers separately and have an outer wrapper handle any leftover parameters.

Notes: The XlaFullyShardedDataParallel class supports both the ZeRO-2 optimizer (sharding gradients and optimizer states) and the ZeRO-3 optimizer (sharding parameters, gradients, and optimizer states) in https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02054. The ZeRO-3 optimizer should be implemented via nested FSDP with reshard_after_forward=True. See test/test_train_mp_mnist_fsdp_with_ckpt.py and test/test_train_mp_imagenet_fsdp.py for an example. * For large models that cannot fit into a single TPU memory or the host CPU memory, one should interleave submodule construction with inner FSDP wrapping. See FSDPViTModel for an example. a simple wrapper checkpoint_module is provided (based on torch_xla.utils.checkpoint.checkpoint from https://github.com/pytorch/xla/pull/3524) to perform gradient checkpointing over a given nn.Module instance. See test/test_train_mp_mnist_fsdp_with_ckpt.py and test/test_train_mp_imagenet_fsdp.py for an example. Auto-wrapping submodules: instead of manually nested FSDP wrapping, one can also specify an auto_wrap_policy argument to automatically wrap the submodules with inner FSDP. size_based_auto_wrap_policy in torch_xla.distributed.fsdp.wrap is an example of auto_wrap_policy callable, this policy wraps layers with the number of parameters larger than 100M. transformer_auto_wrap_policy in torch_xla.distributed.fsdp.wrap is an example of auto_wrap_policy callable for transformer-like model architectures.

For example, to automatically wrap all torch.nn.Conv2d submodules with inner FSDP, one can use:

from torch_xla.distributed.fsdp.wrap import transformer_auto_wrap_policy
auto_wrap_policy = partial(transformer_auto_wrap_policy, transformer_layer_cls={torch.nn.Conv2d})

Additionally, one can also specify an auto_wrapper_callable argument to use a custom callable wrapper for the submodules (the default wrapper is just the XlaFullyShardedDataParallel class itself). For example, one can use the following to apply gradient checkpointing (i.e. activation checkpointing/rematerialization) to each auto-wrapped submodule.

from torch_xla.distributed.fsdp import checkpoint_module
auto_wrapper_callable = lambda m, *args, **kwargs: XlaFullyShardedDataParallel(
    checkpoint_module(m), *args, **kwargs)
  • When stepping the optimizer, directly call optimizer.step and do not call xm.optimizer_step. The latter reduces the gradient across ranks, which is not needed for FSDP (where the parameters are already sharded).

  • When saving model and optimizer checkpoints during training, each training process needs to save its own checkpoint of the (sharded) model and optimizer state dicts (use master_only=False and set different paths for each rank in xm.save). When resuming, it needs to load the checkpoint for the corresponding rank.

  • Please also save model.get_shard_metadata() along with model.state_dict() as follows and use consolidate_sharded_model_checkpoints to stitch the sharded model checkpoints together into a full model state dict. See test/test_train_mp_mnist_fsdp_with_ckpt.py for an example.

ckpt = {
    'model': model.state_dict(),
    'shard_metadata': model.get_shard_metadata(),
    'optimizer': optimizer.state_dict(),
}
ckpt_path = f'/tmp/rank-{xr.global_ordinal()}-of-{xr.world_size()}.pth'
xm.save(ckpt, ckpt_path, master_only=False)
  • The checkpoint consolidation script can also be launched from the command line as follows.

# consolidate the saved checkpoints via command line tool
python3 -m torch_xla.distributed.fsdp.consolidate_sharded_ckpts \
  --ckpt_prefix /path/to/your_sharded_checkpoint_files \
  --ckpt_suffix "_rank-*-of-*.pth"

The implementation of this class is largely inspired by and mostly follows the structure of fairscale.nn.FullyShardedDataParallel in https://fairscale.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/nn/fsdp.html. One of the biggest differences from fairscale.nn.FullyShardedDataParallel is that in XLA we don’t have explicit parameter storage, so here we resort to a different approach to free full parameters for ZeRO-3.

Example training scripts on MNIST and ImageNet

Installation

FSDP is available on PyTorch/XLA 1.12 release and newer nightly. Please refer to https://github.com/pytorch/xla#-available-images-and-wheels for installation guide.

Clone PyTorch/XLA repo

git clone --recursive https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch
cd pytorch/
git clone --recursive https://github.com/pytorch/xla.git
cd ~/

Train MNIST on v3-8 TPU

It gets around 98.9 accuracy for 2 epochs:

python3 ~/pytorch/xla/test/test_train_mp_mnist_fsdp_with_ckpt.py \
  --batch_size 16 --drop_last --num_epochs 2 \
  --use_nested_fsdp --use_gradient_checkpointing

This script automatically tests checkpoint consolidation at the end. You can also manually consolidate the sharded checkpoints via

# consolidate the saved checkpoints via command line tool
python3 -m torch_xla.distributed.fsdp.consolidate_sharded_ckpts \
  --ckpt_prefix /tmp/mnist-fsdp/final_ckpt \
  --ckpt_suffix "_rank-*-of-*.pth"

Train ImageNet with ResNet-50 on v3-8 TPU

It gets around 75.9 accuracy for 100 epochs; download ImageNet-1k to /datasets/imagenet-1k:

python3 ~/pytorch/xla/test/test_train_mp_imagenet_fsdp.py \
  --datadir /datasets/imagenet-1k --drop_last \
  --model resnet50 --test_set_batch_size 64 --eval_interval 10 \
  --lr 0.4 --batch_size 128 --num_warmup_epochs 5 --lr_scheduler_divide_every_n_epochs 30 --lr_scheduler_divisor 10 --num_epochs 100 \
  --use_nested_fsdp

You can also add --use_gradient_checkpointing (which needs to be used along with --use_nested_fsdp or --auto_wrap_policy) to apply gradient checkpointing on the residual blocks.

Example training scripts on TPU pod (with 10 billion parameters)

To train large models that cannot fit into a single TPU, one should apply auto-wrap or manually wrap the submodules with inner FSDP when building the entire model to implement the ZeRO-3 algorithm.

Please see https://github.com/ronghanghu/vit_10b_fsdp_example for an example of sharded training of a Vision Transformer (ViT) model using this XLA FSDP PR.

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