Below I've provided steps for the simpilest way to run deepspeed when using Hugging Face tools for training. This is using the Hugging Face Accelerate library, which supports the use of Deepspeed. However, this method doesn't allow for full deepspeed customization, which may be necessary in some cases.

This guide is based primarily on the information from the Hugging Face Accelerate guide. More detailed info can be found here.

1. Set up the accelerate configuration by running:

   accelerate config

   • When prompted, answer the questions as applicable to your training run. Here's an example of the answers to these questions for ZeRO Stage 1:

     • In which compute environment are you running? This machine.
     • Which type of machine are you using? multi-GPU
     • How many different machines will you use (use more than 1 for multi-node training)? 1
     • Should distrbuted operations be checked while running for errors? This can avoid timeout issues but will be slower. yes
     • Do you wish to optimize your script with torch dynamo? NO
     • Do you want to use DeepSpeed? yes
     • Do you want to specify a json file to a DeepSpeed config? NO
     • What should be your DeepSpeed's ZeRO optimization stage? 1
     • How many gradient accumulation steps you're passing in your script? 1
     • Do you want to use gradient clipping? yes
     • What is the gradient clipping value? 1.0 (the default in the Hugging Face trainer)
     • Do you want to enable 'deepspeed.zero.Init' when using ZeRO Stage-3 for constructing massive models? NO
     • Do you want to enable Mixture-of-Experts training (MoE)? NO
     • How many GPU(s) should be used for distributed training? (the # of gpus on your system)
     • Do you wish to use FP16 or BF16 (mixed precision)? fp16

   • If you are running ZeRO Stage 2 or 3, you will also be prompted about optimizer, gradient, and parameter offloading. Currently, our systems can support offloading to cpu (but not NVMe). Be aware that offloading to cpu will decrease your gpu memory usage, but will slow down the training.

   • Note: you can optionally provide a deepspeed configuation json file here. There are many deepspeed configuration options that you cannot set from the accelerate config command. If you want control over these options, you should provide the path to a deepspeed config file. I've provided an example of the json file format. Note that values that equal to 'auto' will be automatically populated based on your Hugging Face config. Not all configurations can be set to 'auto' - more info about this can be found at the Hugging Face link above.

   • More detailed info about deepspeed config files can be found here.

2. Setup your python script.

   • You cannot run deepspeed for multi-gpu training from a jupyter notebook, you need to use a python script.

   • No deepspeed-specific modifications to the python script are needed. Two examples of the scripts I use are provided, but you don't need to format your scripts in any particular way (For instance, I use an argument parser to parse config and training info from a YAML file, this is not required).

   • One important note: don't use wandb.init() to initalize your wandb run, this will cause your wandb session to be intitialized multiple times. Just set the wandb enviornmental variables and training arguments in your script (as shown in the example scripts) and let Hugging Face initialize wandb for you.

3. Start a terminal multiplexer. This is required, otherwise your training with timeout when you close your connection to the server.

   • tmux and screen are good options. A useful tmux cheatsheet can be found here.

   • To start a new tmux session:

     tmux new -s session-name

4. Run your script using the accelerate launch command. For the example scripts I provided, the command would be:

   accelerate launch robertaconfig-train.py --train_config train-config_BALM-paired.yaml

5. Once the training has started, you should detach from the tmux session. Press Ctrl + b then d to detach.

   • To reattach to the terminal at any point during training, the command is:

     tmux attach -t session-name

6. Once training is complete, you can kill the tmux session:

   tmux kill-session -t session-name