AWS OFI NCCL

AWS OFI NCCL is a plug-in which enables EC2 developers to use libfabric as a network provider while running NVIDIA's NCCL based applications.

Overview

Machine learning frameworks running on top of NVIDIA GPUs use a library called NCCL which provides standard collective communication routines for an arbitrary number of GPUs installed across single or multiple nodes.

This project implements a plug-in which maps NCCLs connection-oriented transport APIs to libfabric's connection-less reliable interface. This allows NCCL applications to take benefit of libfabric's transport layer services like reliable message support and operating system bypass.

Requirements

The plug-in currently supports the following distributions:

• Amazon Linux
• Amazon Linux 2
• Redhat Enterprise Linux 7
• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• CentOS 7

It also requires Libfabric v1.8.x and supports NCCL v2.4.6.

Libfabric supports various providers. The plug-in can choose only those which support the following features as defined in the libfabric API documentation.

• Tagged messaging (FI_TAGGED, FI_MSG)
• Data transfer context structures (FI_CONTEXT)
• Reliable datagram endpoints (FI_EP_RDM)
• Send after Send ordering semantics (FI_ORDER_SAS)
• Automatic control and data progress model (FI_PROGRESS_AUTO)

Getting Started

Dependencies

aws-ofi-nccl requires working installations of NCCL and libfabric. You can find the instructions for installing the first two at NCCL installation and libfabric installation respectively.

Build Instructions

The plugin uses GNU autotools for its build system. You can build it as follows:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

If you want to install the plugin in a custom path, use the --prefix configure flag to provide the path. You can also point the build to custom dependencies with the following flags:

  --with-libfabric=PATH   Path to non-standard libfabric installation
  --with-cuda=PATH        Path to non-standard CUDA installation
  --with-nccl=PATH        Path to non-standard NCCL installation
  --with-mpi=PATH         Path to non-standard MPI installation

Running Unit Tests

Running unit tests requires a working MPI installation and a MPI setup between the communicating hosts. To install MPI, you can use standard packages provided for your linux distribution. Once MPI is setup, you can use commands like below for running any test of your choice.

mpirun -n 2 --host <host-1>,<host-2> $INSTALL_PREFIX/bin/nccl_message_transfer

Note: All tests require 2 MPI ranks to run except ring.c which requires atleast 3 ranks.

Running nccl-perf tests

To run standard nccl-perf tests with the aws-ofi-nccl plugin, you can follow the instructions below.

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA/nccl-tests.git

2. Build the tests

cd  nccl-tests/
make NCCL_HOME=~/nccl/build/

3. Run perf tests

NCCL_DEBUG=INFO build/all_reduce_perf -b 8 -f 2 -e 32M -c 1

If you installed the AWS libfabric plugin in a custom prefix, ensure LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set to include that prefix so the perf test binaries can find the plugin.

Known Issues

The plugin returns only 1 NIC device even if the system supports multiple NICs.

Getting Help

If you have any issues in building or using the package or if you think you may have found a bug, please open an issue.

Contributing

Reporting issues and sending pull requests are always welcome. To learn how you can contribute, please look at our contributing guidelines.

License

This library is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.