tpucare 0.0.1

Babysit your preemptible TPUs - in python

TPU Care

Automatically take good care of your preemptible TPUs

Usage

Long-running preemptible training

For example, the following code can be used to create a production-ready v3-256 using the HomebrewNLP-Jax codebase ( see examples/pod.py for an executable version):

import dataclasses
import typing
from netrc import netrc

import wandb
import yaml

from tpucare import exec_command, exec_on_tpu, send_to_tpu, start_single

_, _, wandb_key = netrc().authenticators("api.wandb.ai")


@dataclasses.dataclass
class Context:
    retry: int


ZONE = "europe-west4-a"
HOST = "big-pod"
RUN_NAME = "256-core-tpu"


def load_config(ctx: Context):
    with open("config.yaml", 'r') as f:
        config = f.read()
    config = yaml.safe_load(config)

    wandb_api = wandb.Api()
    config["training"]["do_checkpoint"] = True
    base_checkpoint_path = config["training"]["checkpoint_path"]

    start_step = 0
    for run in wandb_api.runs(f"{config['wandb']['entity']}/{config['wandb']['project']}"):
        if run.name == config['wandb']['name']:
            start_step = run.summary["_step"]
            break
    start_step -= start_step % config["training"]["checkpoint_interval"]

    config["training"]["start_step"] = start_step
    config["wandb"]["name"] = f"{RUN_NAME}-{ctx.retry}"
    if ctx.retry > 0:
        config["training"]["checkpoint_load_path"] = config["training"]["checkpoint_path"]
    config["training"]["checkpoint_path"] = f"{base_checkpoint_path}-{ctx.retry}"
    return yaml.dump(config)


def start_fn(ctx: Context, worker: int):
    """
    This function gets executed in threads to start a run on a new TPU. It receives the context object returned by 
    `creation_callback` as well as the worker id which corresponds to the slice id this code was executed on in a 
    multi-host setup. For single-host setups, such as v3-8s, the "worker" will always be set to 0.
    Ideally, it'd copy necessary files to the TPU and then run those. Here, `exec_command` can be used to create an 
    execution command that automatically spawns a `screen` session which persists even when the SSH connection gets cut.
    """
    send_to_tpu(ZONE, HOST, "config.yaml", load_config(ctx), worker)
    cmd = exec_command(repository="https://github.com/HomebrewNLP/HomebrewNLP-Jax", wandb_key=wandb_key)
    send_to_tpu(ZONE, HOST, "setup.sh", cmd, worker)
    exec_on_tpu(ZONE, HOST, "bash setup.sh", worker)


def creation_callback(host: str, ctx: typing.Optional[Context]) -> Context:
    """
    The `creation_callback` is called once whenever a new TPU gets created and can be used to persist state
    (such as retry counters) across multiple invocations.
    """
    if ctx is None:  # first invocation
        return Context(0)
    ctx.retry += 1
    return ctx


def main(service_account: str, tpu_version: int = 3, slices: int = 32, preemptible: bool = True):
    start_single(host=HOST, tpu_version=tpu_version, zone=ZONE, preemptible=preemptible,
                 service_account=service_account, slices=slices, start_fn=start_fn,
                 creation_callback=creation_callback)

Sweeps

Similarly, large swarms of instances can be launched trivially using TPUtils. Here, we largely do the same setup as above, but call launch_multiple instead of launch_single which takes the additional argument tpus specifying the number of TPUs that should be launched and babysit. Depending on capacity and quota, the actual number of TPUs you get might be lower than the number of TPUs specified.

def main(service_account: str, tpus: int, tpu_version: int = 3, slices: int = 32, preemptible: bool = True):
    start_multiple(prefix=HOST, tpu_version=tpu_version, zone=ZONE, preemptible=preemptible,
                   service_account=service_account, slices=slices, start_fn=start_fn,
                   creation_callback=creation_callback, tpus=tpus)

However, this would simply launch the same run many times. If you instead plan to register them with a WandB Sweep, we need to modify the start_fn to join the wandb sweep.
By patching in the code below, TPUtils will start and maintain a large swarm of TPUs all working towards the same hyperparameter optimization problem.

with open("sweep.yaml", 'r') as f:  # sweep config passed straight to wandb
    config = yaml.safe_load(f.read())
sweep_id = wandb.sweep(config, entity="homebrewnlp", project="gpt")


def start_fn(ctx: Context, worker: int):
    cmd = exec_command(repository="https://github.com/HomebrewNLP/HomebrewNLP-Jax", wandb_key=wandb_key,
                       run_command=f"/home/ubuntu/.local/bin/wandb agent {sweep_id}")
    send_to_tpu(ZONE, HOST, "setup.sh", cmd, worker)
    exec_on_tpu(ZONE, HOST, "bash setup.sh", worker)

The full executable code can be found in examples/sweep.py.

Similarly, the start_fn could be adapted to start an inference server for HomebrewNLP or Craiyon or even execute machine learning unit-tests in parallel.