When we execute distributed programs on PAI, we can add different task roles for our job. For single server jobs, there is only one task role. For distributed jobs, there may be multiple task roles. For example, when TensorFlow is used to running distributed jobs, it has two roles, including the parameter server and the worker. In distributed jobs, each role may have one or more instances. For example, if it's 8 instances in a worker role of TensorFlow. It means there should be 8 Docker containers for the worker role. Please visit here for specific operations.
In a distributed job, one task might communicate with others (When we say task, we mean a single instance of a task role). So a task need to be aware of other tasks' runtime information such as IP, port, etc. The system exposes such runtime information as environment variables to each task's Docker container. For mutual communication, users can write code in the container to access those runtime environment variables. Please visit here for specific operations.
If unknown error happens, PAI will retry the job according to user settings. To set a retry policy and completion policy for user's job，PAI asks user to switch to Advanced mode. Please visit here for specific operations.
| Example Name | Multi-GPU | Multi-Node | Backend | Apex | Job protocol |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-Node DataParallel CIFAR-10 | ✓ | x | - | - | cifar10-single-node-gpus-cpu-DP.yaml |
| cifar10-single-mul-DDP-gloo.yaml | ✓ | ✓ | gloo | - | cifar10-single-mul-DDP-gloo.yaml |
| cifar10-single-mul-DDP-nccl | ✓ | ✓ | nccl | - | cifar10-single-mul-DDP-nccl.yaml |
| cifar10-single-mul-DDP-gloo-Apex-mixed | ✓ | ✓ | gloo | ✓ | cifar10-single-mul-DDP-gloo-Apex-mixed.yaml |
| cifar10-single-mul-DDP-nccl-Apex-mixed | ✓ | ✓ | nccl | ✓ | cifar10-single-mul-DDP-gloo-Apex-mixed.yaml |
| imagenet-single-mul-DDP-gloo | ✓ | ✓ | gloo | - | imagenet-single-mul-DDP-gloo.yaml |
The single node program is simple. The program executed in PAI is exactly the same as the program in our machine. It should be noted that an Worker can be applied in PAI and a Instance can be applied in Worker. In a worker, we can apply for GPUs that we need. We provide an example of DP.
DDP requires users set a master node ip and port for synchronization in PyTorch. For the port, you can simply set one certain port, such as 5000 as your master port. However, this port may conflict with others. To prevent port conflict, you can reserve a port in OpenPAI, as we mentioned here. The port you reserved is available in environmental variables like PAI_PORT_LIST_$taskRole_$taskIndex_$portLabel, where $taskIndex means the instance index of that task role. For example, if your task role name is work and port label is SyncPort, you can add the following code in your PyTorch DDP program:
os.environ['MASTER_ADDR'] = os.environ['PAI_HOST_IP_worker_0']
os.environ['MASTER_PORT'] = os.environ['PAI_worker_0_SynPort_PORT']
If you are using gloo as your DDP communication backend, please set correct network interface such as export GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME=eth0.