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Distributed communication package - torch.distributed

Note

Please refer to PyTorch Distributed Overview for a brief introduction to all features related to distributed training.

.. automodule:: torch.distributed

.. currentmodule:: torch.distributed

Backends

torch.distributed supports three built-in backends, each with different capabilities. The table below shows which functions are available for use with CPU / CUDA tensors. MPI supports CUDA only if the implementation used to build PyTorch supports it.

Backend gloo mpi nccl
Device CPU GPU CPU GPU CPU GPU
send ✓ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✘
recv ✓ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✘
broadcast ✓ ✓ ✓ ? ✘ ✓
all_reduce ✓ ✓ ✓ ? ✘ ✓
reduce ✓ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✓
all_gather ✓ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✓
gather ✓ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✘
scatter ✓ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✘
reduce_scatter ✘ ✘ ✘ ✘ ✘ ✓
all_to_all ✘ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✘
barrier ✓ ✘ ✓ ? ✘ ✓

Backends that come with PyTorch

PyTorch distributed currently only supports Linux. By default, the Gloo and NCCL backends are built and included in PyTorch distributed (NCCL only when building with CUDA). MPI is an optional backend that can only be included if you build PyTorch from source. (e.g. building PyTorch on a host that has MPI installed.)

Which backend to use?

In the past, we were often asked: "which backend should I use?".

  • Rule of thumb
    • Use the NCCL backend for distributed GPU training
    • Use the Gloo backend for distributed CPU training.
  • GPU hosts with InfiniBand interconnect
    • Use NCCL, since it's the only backend that currently supports InfiniBand and GPUDirect.
  • GPU hosts with Ethernet interconnect
    • Use NCCL, since it currently provides the best distributed GPU training performance, especially for multiprocess single-node or multi-node distributed training. If you encounter any problem with NCCL, use Gloo as the fallback option. (Note that Gloo currently runs slower than NCCL for GPUs.)
  • CPU hosts with InfiniBand interconnect
    • If your InfiniBand has enabled IP over IB, use Gloo, otherwise, use MPI instead. We are planning on adding InfiniBand support for Gloo in the upcoming releases.
  • CPU hosts with Ethernet interconnect
    • Use Gloo, unless you have specific reasons to use MPI.

Common environment variables

Choosing the network interface to use

By default, both the NCCL and Gloo backends will try to find the right network interface to use. If the automatically detected interface is not correct, you can override it using the following environment variables (applicable to the respective backend):

  • NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME, for example export NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME=eth0
  • GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME, for example export GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME=eth0

If you're using the Gloo backend, you can specify multiple interfaces by separating them by a comma, like this: export GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME=eth0,eth1,eth2,eth3. The backend will dispatch operations in a round-robin fashion across these interfaces. It is imperative that all processes specify the same number of interfaces in this variable.

Other NCCL environment variables

NCCL has also provided a number of environment variables for fine-tuning purposes.

Commonly used ones include the following for debugging purposes:

  • export NCCL_DEBUG=INFO
  • export NCCL_DEBUG_SUBSYS=ALL

For the full list of NCCL environment variables, please refer to NVIDIA NCCL's official documentation

Basics

The torch.distributed package provides PyTorch support and communication primitives for multiprocess parallelism across several computation nodes running on one or more machines. The class :func:`torch.nn.parallel.DistributedDataParallel` builds on this functionality to provide synchronous distributed training as a wrapper around any PyTorch model. This differs from the kinds of parallelism provided by :doc:`multiprocessing` and :func:`torch.nn.DataParallel` in that it supports multiple network-connected machines and in that the user must explicitly launch a separate copy of the main training script for each process.

In the single-machine synchronous case, torch.distributed or the :func:`torch.nn.parallel.DistributedDataParallel` wrapper may still have advantages over other approaches to data-parallelism, including :func:`torch.nn.DataParallel`:

  • Each process maintains its own optimizer and performs a complete optimization step with each iteration. While this may appear redundant, since the gradients have already been gathered together and averaged across processes and are thus the same for every process, this means that no parameter broadcast step is needed, reducing time spent transferring tensors between nodes.
  • Each process contains an independent Python interpreter, eliminating the extra interpreter overhead and "GIL-thrashing" that comes from driving several execution threads, model replicas, or GPUs from a single Python process. This is especially important for models that make heavy use of the Python runtime, including models with recurrent layers or many small components.

Initialization

The package needs to be initialized using the :func:`torch.distributed.init_process_group` function before calling any other methods. This blocks until all processes have joined.

.. autofunction:: is_available


.. autofunction:: init_process_group


.. autoclass:: Backend


.. autofunction:: get_backend


.. autofunction:: get_rank


.. autofunction:: get_world_size


.. autofunction:: is_initialized


.. autofunction:: is_mpi_available


.. autofunction:: is_nccl_available

Currently three initialization methods are supported:

TCP initialization

There are two ways to initialize using TCP, both requiring a network address reachable from all processes and a desired world_size. The first way requires specifying an address that belongs to the rank 0 process. This initialization method requires that all processes have manually specified ranks.

Note that multicast address is not supported anymore in the latest distributed package. group_name is deprecated as well.

import torch.distributed as dist

# Use address of one of the machines
dist.init_process_group(backend, init_method='tcp://10.1.1.20:23456',
                        rank=args.rank, world_size=4)

Shared file-system initialization

Another initialization method makes use of a file system that is shared and visible from all machines in a group, along with a desired world_size. The URL should start with file:// and contain a path to a non-existent file (in an existing directory) on a shared file system. File-system initialization will automatically create that file if it doesn't exist, but will not delete the file. Therefore, it is your responsibility to make sure that the file is cleaned up before the next :func:`init_process_group` call on the same file path/name.

Note that automatic rank assignment is not supported anymore in the latest distributed package and group_name is deprecated as well.

Warning

This method assumes that the file system supports locking using fcntl - most local systems and NFS support it.

Warning

This method will always create the file and try its best to clean up and remove the file at the end of the program. In other words, each initialization with the file init method will need a brand new empty file in order for the initialization to succeed. If the same file used by the previous initialization (which happens not to get cleaned up) is used again, this is unexpected behavior and can often cause deadlocks and failures. Therefore, even though this method will try its best to clean up the file, if the auto-delete happens to be unsuccessful, it is your responsibility to ensure that the file is removed at the end of the training to prevent the same file to be reused again during the next time. This is especially important if you plan to call :func:`init_process_group` multiple times on the same file name. In other words, if the file is not removed/cleaned up and you call :func:`init_process_group` again on that file, failures are expected. The rule of thumb here is that, make sure that the file is non-existent or empty every time :func:`init_process_group` is called.

import torch.distributed as dist

# rank should always be specified
dist.init_process_group(backend, init_method='file:///mnt/nfs/sharedfile',
                        world_size=4, rank=args.rank)

Environment variable initialization

This method will read the configuration from environment variables, allowing one to fully customize how the information is obtained. The variables to be set are:

  • MASTER_PORT - required; has to be a free port on machine with rank 0
  • MASTER_ADDR - required (except for rank 0); address of rank 0 node
  • WORLD_SIZE - required; can be set either here, or in a call to init function
  • RANK - required; can be set either here, or in a call to init function

The machine with rank 0 will be used to set up all connections.

This is the default method, meaning that init_method does not have to be specified (or can be env://).

Groups

By default collectives operate on the default group (also called the world) and require all processes to enter the distributed function call. However, some workloads can benefit from more fine-grained communication. This is where distributed groups come into play. :func:`~torch.distributed.new_group` function can be used to create new groups, with arbitrary subsets of all processes. It returns an opaque group handle that can be given as a group argument to all collectives (collectives are distributed functions to exchange information in certain well-known programming patterns).

.. autofunction:: new_group

Point-to-point communication

.. autofunction:: send


.. autofunction:: recv

:func:`~torch.distributed.isend` and :func:`~torch.distributed.irecv` return distributed request objects when used. In general, the type of this object is unspecified as they should never be created manually, but they are guaranteed to support two methods:

  • is_completed() - returns True if the operation has finished
  • wait() - will block the process until the operation is finished. is_completed() is guaranteed to return True once it returns.
.. autofunction:: isend


.. autofunction:: irecv

Synchronous and asynchronous collective operations

Every collective operation function supports the following two kinds of operations:

synchronous operation - the default mode, when async_op is set to False. when the function returns, it is guaranteed that the collective operation is performed (not necessarily completed if it's a CUDA op since all CUDA ops are asynchronous), and any further function calls depending on the data of the collective operation can be called. In the synchronous mode, the collective function does not return anything

asynchronous operation - when async_op is set to True. The collective operation function returns a distributed request object. In general, you don't need to create it manually and it is guaranteed to support two methods:

  • is_completed() - returns True if the operation has finished
  • wait() - will block the process until the operation is finished.

Collective functions

.. autofunction:: broadcast


.. autofunction:: all_reduce


.. autofunction:: reduce


.. autofunction:: all_gather


.. autofunction:: gather


.. autofunction:: scatter


.. autofunction:: reduce_scatter


.. autofunction:: all_to_all


.. autofunction:: barrier


.. autoclass:: ReduceOp

Deprecated enum-like class for reduction operations: SUM, PRODUCT, MIN, and MAX.

:class:`~torch.distributed.ReduceOp` is recommended to use instead.

Multi-GPU collective functions

If you have more than one GPU on each node, when using the NCCL and Gloo backend, :func:`~torch.distributed.broadcast_multigpu` :func:`~torch.distributed.all_reduce_multigpu` :func:`~torch.distributed.reduce_multigpu` :func:`~torch.distributed.all_gather_multigpu` and :func:`~torch.distributed.reduce_scatter_multigpu` support distributed collective operations among multiple GPUs within each node. These functions can potentially improve the overall distributed training performance and be easily used by passing a list of tensors. Each Tensor in the passed tensor list needs to be on a separate GPU device of the host where the function is called. Note that the length of the tensor list needs to be identical among all the distributed processes. Also note that currently the multi-GPU collective functions are only supported by the NCCL backend.

For example, if the system we use for distributed training has 2 nodes, each of which has 8 GPUs. On each of the 16 GPUs, there is a tensor that we would like to all-reduce. The following code can serve as a reference:

Code running on Node 0

import torch
import torch.distributed as dist

dist.init_process_group(backend="nccl",
                        init_method="file:///distributed_test",
                        world_size=2,
                        rank=0)
tensor_list = []
for dev_idx in range(torch.cuda.device_count()):
    tensor_list.append(torch.FloatTensor([1]).cuda(dev_idx))

dist.all_reduce_multigpu(tensor_list)

Code running on Node 1

import torch
import torch.distributed as dist

dist.init_process_group(backend="nccl",
                        init_method="file:///distributed_test",
                        world_size=2,
                        rank=1)
tensor_list = []
for dev_idx in range(torch.cuda.device_count()):
    tensor_list.append(torch.FloatTensor([1]).cuda(dev_idx))

dist.all_reduce_multigpu(tensor_list)

After the call, all 16 tensors on the two nodes will have the all-reduced value of 16

.. autofunction:: broadcast_multigpu


.. autofunction:: all_reduce_multigpu


.. autofunction:: reduce_multigpu


.. autofunction:: all_gather_multigpu


.. autofunction:: reduce_scatter_multigpu

Third-party backends

Besides the GLOO/MPI/NCCL backends, PyTorch distributed supports third-party backends through a run-time register mechanism. For references on how to develop a third-party backend through C++ Extension, please refer to Tutorials - Custom C++ and CUDA Extensions and test/cpp_extensions/cpp_c10d_extension.cpp. The capability of third-party backends are decided by their own implementations.

The new backend derives from c10d.ProcessGroup and registers the backend name and the instantiating interface through :func:`torch.distributed.Backend.register_backend` when imported.

When manually importing this backend and invoking :func:`torch.distributed.init_process_group` with the corresponding backend name, the torch.distributed package runs on the new backend.

Warning

The support of third-party backend is experimental and subject to change.

Launch utility

The torch.distributed package also provides a launch utility in torch.distributed.launch. This helper utility can be used to launch multiple processes per node for distributed training.

.. automodule:: torch.distributed.launch

Spawn utility

The :ref:`multiprocessing-doc` package also provides a spawn function in :func:`torch.multiprocessing.spawn`. This helper function can be used to spawn multiple processes. It works by passing in the function that you want to run and spawns N processes to run it. This can be used for multiprocess distributed training as well.

For references on how to use it, please refer to PyTorch example - ImageNet implementation

Note that this function requires Python 3.4 or higher.