README.md

Load balancer for SLURM in the PennNLP Cluster

Files

• train_with_last_checkpoint.sh: Runs a slurm job that automatically detects the last checkpoint of a model and passes it as a parameter --resume_from_checkpoint to your python script (See Section Python Script Requirements). This has been tested with models using the transformers.Trainer API but it should be applicable with minor modifications to other training libraries (See Section Modifications for Other Training Libraries).
  You can run the script as follows:

sbatch <SBATCH_OPTIONS> train_with_last_checkpoint.sh $1 $2 $3

For the <SBATCH_OPTIONS> (run sbatch --help for documentation). The arguments to train_with_last_checkpoint.sh are specified as follows: - $1: python path. You can find which python is used by your envrironment by running which python on the terminal. - $2: your checkpoint directory. - $3: your python script with all arguments other than the --resume_from_checkpoint and --output_dir arguments since they are handled separately. --output_dir is set by argument $4 and checkpoint is automatically found to be the latest checkpoint in --output_dir.

Here is a concrete example on how to run this to train a small T5 model on SQuAD. You can use an existing conda environment if you already have pytorch, transformers, and datasets installed. Otherwise first run the installation:

>> conda create -n test_me python=3.7
>> conda activate test_me
>> conda install pytorch pytorch-cuda=11.7 -c pytorch -c nvidia
>> conda install -c huggingface transformers
>> python -m pip install -r simple_train_example/requirements.txt

Then you can run the following to get the dummy example to run.

>> export PYTHON_DIR=$(which python) && echo $PYTHON_DIR
/your/python/path/bin/python
>> export PWD=$(pwd) && echo $PWD
/path/to/auto_last_ckpt
>> mkdir $PWD/test_slurm_logs/
>> sbatch -J test_auto_ckpt -c 1 --mem 2400 -o $PWD/test_slurm_logs/out.txt -e $PWD/test_slurm_logs/err.txt -G 1 -t 10 train_with_last_checkpoint.sh $PYTHON_DIR simple_train_example/checkpoints simple_train_example/train.py --tiny --cache_dir simple_train_example/cache 

• continuous_deployment.sh: wrapper script that creates a new job every time a job ends. Uses squeue to monitor the status of submitted jobs. You can run the script as follows

>> chmod +x continuous_deployment.sh
>> ./continuous_deployment.sh <MAX_ITERATIONS> "<BATCH_OPTIONS>" $PYTHON_DIR <checkpoint_dir>  <python_file> <python_args>> <log_file> 2>&1 & 

For example

>> conda activate test_me
>> export PYTHON_DIR=$(which python) && echo $PYTHON_DIR
>> export PWD=$(pwd) && echo $PWD
>> mkdir $PWD/test_slurm_logs/
>> chmod +x continuous_deployment.sh
>> ./continuous_deployment.sh 10 "-J test_auto_ckpt -c 1 --mem 64 -o $PWD/test_slurm_logs/out.txt -e $PWD/test_slurm_logs/err.txt -G 1 -t 10" $PYTHON_DIR simple_train_example/checkpoints simple_train_example/train.py --tiny --cache_dir simple_train_example/cache   > continuous_deployment_logs.txt 2>&1 & 

Cleanup test

To clean up after testing make sure to run:

>> conda remove -n test_me --all
>> rm -r /nlp/data/$USER_NAME/test_slurm_logs
>> rm -r simple_train_example/checkpoints
>> rm -r simple_train_example/cache

You could also consider

Python Script Requirements

The python script to run should contain an argument --resume_from_checkpoint that stores the path to the checkpoint and --output_dir that will be the path to the folder that contains a subfolder checkpoints where all checkpoints will be stored. This can be achieved using the following code in the argument parser

import argparse
def parse_args():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument(
        "--resume_from_checkpoint",
        type=str,
        const=None,
        default=None,
        help="Resume training from a given checkpoint.",
    )
    parser.add_argument(
        "--output_dir",
        type=str,
        default= os.path.join(os.getcwd(), "checkpoints"),
        help="Checkpoint directory",
    )
    return parser.parse_args()
args = parse_args()

Then the trainer should employ this checkpoint by passing it to its TrainingArguments

 training_args = TrainingArguments(
        ...
        output_dir=args.output_dir,
        resume_from_checkpoint=args.resume_from_checkpoint,
    )

 trainer = Trainer(
        ....
        args=training_args,
    )

    trainer.train()

Tips and Tricks

• Cache your dataloaders: preprocessing can take time, and we do not want to waste this time on the clusters. A way to do that is using the datasets.load_from_disk and Dataset.save_to_disk methods in transformers. The simple_train_example/train.py includes an example of how you can do that.
• To increase fairness, try to checkpoint often and set low times for sbatch jobs (~2-5hrs seems reasonable depending on model size). HOWEVER, try not to store too many checkpoints - Trainer handles deletion of old checkpoints if you set save_total_limit in TrainingArgs. Checkpoints fill up storage very fast.
• transformers.Trainer has an option to retrieve the latest checkpoint by simply passing trainer.train(resume_from_checkpoint=True), however, this repository tried to relly as little as possible to the underlying implementation so it can be used with different training libraries.

Modifications for Other Training Libraries

As long as:

• you specify the correct checkpoint directory,
• checkpoints are saved in increasing alphabetical order based on step number, and
• have the requirements specified in Section Python Script Requirements I do not see a reason why this would not work of the shelf. Please post issues on github and I will get to them as soon as I can :) The README will be updated as issues come through with the corresponding solutions.