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arXiv · 2411.00284

SimpleFSDP: Simpler Fully Sharded Data Parallel with torch.compile

Ruisi Zhang·Tianyu Liu·Will Feng·Andrew Gu·Sanket Purandare·Wanchao Liang·Francisco Massa
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Abstract

Distributed training of large models consumes enormous computation resources and requires substantial engineering efforts to compose various training techniques. This paper presents SimpleFSDP, a PyTorch-native compiler-based Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) framework, which has a simple implementation for maintenance and composability, allows full computation-communication graph tracing, and brings performance enhancement via compiler backend optimizations. SimpleFSDP's novelty lies in its unique $torch.compile$-friendly implementation of collective communications using existing PyTorch primitives, namely parametrizations, selective activation checkpointing, and DTensor. It also features the first-of-its-kind intermediate representation (IR) nodes bucketing and reordering in the TorchInductor backend for effective computation-communication overlapping. As a result, users can employ the aforementioned optimizations to automatically or manually wrap model components for minimal communication exposure. Extensive evaluations of SimpleFSDP on Llama 3 models (including the ultra-large 405B) using TorchTitan demonstrate up to 28.54% memory reduction and 68.67% throughput improvement compared to the most widely adopted FSDP2 eager framework, when composed with other distributed training techniques.

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Ruisi Zhang, Tianyu Liu, Will Feng, Andrew Gu, Sanket Purandare, Wanchao Liang, Francisco Massa. 2024-11-01. SimpleFSDP: Simpler Fully Sharded Data Parallel with torch.compile. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00284

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