fairscale VS DeepSpeed

I skimmed through the README and paper. What does this library have that that hasn't been included in xformers or fairscale?

Things are slowly moving into PyTorch upstream such as the ZeRO redundancy optimizer but from my experience the team behind DeepSpeed just move faster. There is also fairscale from the FAIR team which seems to be a staging ground for experimental optimizations before they move into PyTorch. If you use Lightning, it's easy enough to try out these various libraries (docs here)

DeepSpeed [1] is amazing tool to enable the different kind of parallelisms and optimizations on your model. I would definitely not recommend reimplementing everything yourself.

Probably FairScale [2] too, but never tried it myself.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed

[2]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairscale

It was helpful for me to see how DeepSpeed/FairScale stack up compared to vanilla PyTorch Distributed Training specifically when trying to reach larger parameter sizes, visualizing the trade off with throughput. A lot of the learnings ended up in the Lightning Documentation under the advanced GPU docs!

I created a feature request on the FairScale project so that we can track the progress on the integration: Support ZeRO-Offload · Issue #337 · facebookresearch/fairscale (github.com)

DeepSpeed can handle parallelism concerns, and even offload data/model to RAM, or even NVMe (!?) . I'm surprised I don't see this project used more.

While on the surface, a 192GB Mac Studio seems like a great deal (it's not much more than a 48GB A6000!), there are several reasons why this might not be a good idea:

* I assume most people have never used llama.cpp Metal w/ large models. It will drop to CPU speeds whenever the context window is full: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/1730#issuecomm... - while sure this might be fixed in the future, it's been an issue since Metal support was added, and is a significant problem if you are actually trying to actually use it for inferencing. With 192GB of memory, you could probably run larger models w/o quantization, but I've never seen anyone post benchmarks of their experiences. Note that at that point, the limited memory bandwidth will be a big factor.

* If you are planning on using Apple Silicon for ML/training, I'd also be wary. There are multi-year long open bugs in PyTorch[1], and most major LLM libs like deepspeed, bitsandbytes, etc don't have Apple Silicon support[2][3].

You can see similar patterns w/ Stable Diffusion support [4][5] - support lagging by months, lots of problems and poor performance with inference, much less fine tuning. You can apply this to basically any ML application you want (srt, tts, video, etc)

Macs are fine to poke around with, but if you actually plan to do more than run a small LLM and say "neat", especially for a business, recommending a Mac for anyone getting started w/ ML workloads is a bad take. (In general, for anyone getting started, unless you're just burning budget, renting cloud GPU is going to be the best cost/perf, although on-prem/local obviously has other advantages.)

[1] https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A...

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/issues/1580

[3] https://github.com/TimDettmers/bitsandbytes/issues/485

[4] https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/disc...

[5] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ai-generated-art-stable...

And https://github.com/microsoft/deepspeed

DeepSpeed Chat: Easy, Fast and Affordable RLHF Training of ChatGPT-like Models at All Scales (https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/tree/master/blogs/deepspeed-chat)