Multinode worse performance than single node with same settings

rirv938 · June 3, 2024, 8:23pm

Hi I am using the Trainer to train a sequence classification model. I get worse performance when I have more than one node.

Even though the settings and batch effective total batch size is the same? what could be happening here.

I am using the Huggingface Trainer and torchrun to run this distributed.

Its not about batch size mistakes because all runs say

Total train batch size (w. parallel, distributed & accumulation) = 256

Multinode is 4 nodes each with 4 A100 Gpus. Singlenode is 1 node with 4 A100 GPUs but with gradient accumulation bumped up to 4 to prevent OOM. They both have the same settings including batch size per device of 16 for the 256 total batch size example.

rirv938 · June 4, 2024, 1:11am

Here is the config. Only difference is gradient accumulation 1 → 4 for single node version. And both were launched using torchrun.

{
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    "value": false
  },
  "fp16": {
    "desc": null,
    "value": true
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  "fsdp": {
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  "seed": {
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    "value": 100
  },
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    "value": null
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  "debug": {
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    "value": 1024
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    "value": "adamw_hf"
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    "value": 50
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    "value": 1
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          "6": [
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        {
          "1": "eval/pairwise_accuracy",
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          "6": [
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        },
        {
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          "5": 1,
          "6": [
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        },
        {
          "1": "eval/samples_per_second",
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          "6": [
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        },
        {
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          "5": 1,
          "6": [
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        {
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          "6": [
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        {
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          "5": 1,
          "6": [
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        },
        {
          "1": "train/learning_rate",
          "5": 1,
          "6": [
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        {
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      "t": {
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        "4": "3.10.12",
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        "6": "4.41.2",
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    "value": true
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    "value": 24
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    "value": false
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    "value": {
      "0": "LABEL_0"
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    "value": {
      "LABEL_0": 0
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  "run_name": {
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    "value": "/tmp/reward_model_100_gpt2-medium_433860e1"
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    "value": "<HUB_TOKEN>"
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    "value": 1
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    "value": {
      "xla": false,
      "xla_fsdp_v2": false,
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      "xla_fsdp_grad_ckpt": false
    }
  },
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    "value": "/tmp/reward_model_100_gpt2-medium_433860e1/runs/Jun03_04-34-17_training-bs-fix-master-0"
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  "torchscript": {
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    "value": false
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  "adam_epsilon": {
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    "value": 1e-8
  },
  "bos_token_id": {
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    "value": 50256
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    "value": false
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    "value": 50256
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  "fp16_backend": {
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    "value": "auto"
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  "hub_strategy": {
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    "value": "every_save"
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    "value": false
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    "value": 0.05
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    "value": "openai-community/gpt2-medium"
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    "value": [
      "GPT2LMHeadModel"
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}

rirv938 · June 12, 2024, 6:01am

I get the same performance if I do

1 node 4 GPUs
2 nodes each with 2 GPUs

therefore its not about internode communication

rirv938 · June 12, 2024, 6:04am

There is a clear relationship where more GPUs = worse performance.

rirv938 · June 13, 2024, 5:50am

Ok I fixed this issue

the random seed was set to the same value on each GPU

this meant that all the dropout masks were the same on each device which led to large and funky gradients

I think this is a gotcha for people and maybe you should handle this internally?

system · June 13, 2024, 5:51pm

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Multinode worse performance than single node with same settings

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