xla VS determined

> The PyTorch/XLA Team at Google

Meanwhile you have an issue from 5 years ago with 0 support

https://github.com/pytorch/xla/issues/202

PyTorch has had an XLA backend for years. I don't know how performant it is though. https://pytorch.org/xla

It's curtains for XLA, to be precise. And PyTorch officially supports XLA backend nowadays too ([1]), which kind of makes JAX and PyTorch standing on the same foundation.

1. https://github.com/pytorch/xla

Pytorch supports other kinds of accelerators (e.g. FPGA, and https://github.com/pytorch/glow), but unless you want to become a ML systems engineer and have money and time to throw away, or a business case to fund it, it is not worth it. In general, both pytorch and tensorflow have hardware abstractions that will compile down to device code. (XLA, https://github.com/pytorch/xla, https://github.com/pytorch/glow). TPUs and GPUs have very different strengths; so getting top performance requires a lot of manual optimizations. Considering the the cost of training LLM, it is time well spent.

While apparently TPUs can theoretically achieve great speedups, getting to the point where they beat a single GPU requires a lot of fiddling around and debugging. A specific setup is required to make it work properly. E.g., here it says that to exploit TPUs you might need a better CPU to keep the TPU busy, than the one in colab. The tutorials I looked at oversimplified the whole matter, the same goes for pytorch-lightning which implies switching to TPU is as easy as changing a single parameter. Furthermore, none of the tutorials I saw (even after specifically searching for that) went into detail about why and how to set up a GCS bucket for data loading.

XLA on TPUs via pytorch/xla.

I don't know of any such trick except for using TensorFlow. In fact, I benchmarked PyTorch XLA vs TensorFlow and found that the former's performance was quite abysmal: PyTorch XLA is very slow on Google Colab. The developers' explanation, as I understood it, was that TF was using features not available to the PyTorch XLA developers and that they therefore could not compete on performance. The situation may be different today, I don't know really.

17. Determined AI | Github | tutorial

Use Determined if you want a nice UI https://github.com/determined-ai/determined#readme

I looked up and found [Determined Platform](determined.ai), tho it looks a very young project that I don't know if it's reliable enough.

- Developer Support Engineer (~1/3 client facing, triaging feature requests and bug reports, etc; 2/3 debugging/troubleshooting)

We are developing enterprise grade artificial intelligence products/services for AI engineering teams and fortune 500 companies and need more software devs to fill the increasing demand.

Find out more at https://determined.ai/. If AI piques your curiosity or you want to interface with highly skilled engineers in the community, apply within (search "determined ai" at careers.hpe.com and drop me a message at asnell AT hpe PERIOD com).

Check out Determined https://github.com/determined-ai/determined to help manage this kind of work at scale: Determined leverages Horovod under the hood, automatically manages cloud resources and can get you up on spot instances, T4's, etc. and will work on your local cluster as well. Gives you additional features like experiment management, scheduling, profiling, model registry, advanced hyperparameter tuning, etc.

Full disclosure: I'm a founder of the project.

These are some of the problems we are trying to solve with the Determined training platform. Determined can be run with or without k8s - the k8s version inherits some of the scheduling problems of k8s, but the non-k8s version uses a custom gang scheduler designed for large scale ML training. Determined offers a priority scheduler that allows smaller jobs to run while being able to schedule a large distributed job whenever you need, by setting a higher priority.

Ah I see - I think we're pretty much on the same page in terms of timetables. Although if you include TPU, I think it's fair to say that custom accelerators are already a moderate success.

Updated my profile. I've been working on DL training platforms and distributed training benchmarking for a bit so I've gotten a nice view into the GPU/TPU battle.

Shameless plug: you should check out the open-source training platform we are building, Determined[1]. One of the goals is to take our hard-earned expertise on training infrastructure and build a tool where people don't need to have that infrastructure expertise. We don't support TPUs, partially because a lack of demand/TPU availability, and partially because our PyTorch TPU experiments were so unimpressive.

[1] GH: https://github.com/determined-ai/determined, Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/determined-community/shared_invite/...

Take a look at Determined https://github.com/determined-ai/determined

determined is an open-source deep learning training platform that makes building models fast and easy. This project provides a CloudFormation template to bootstrap you into AWS and then has a number of tutorials covering how to manage your data, train and then deploy inference endpoints. If you are looking to explore more open source machine learning projects, then check this one out.