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Enable Memory Profiling

Launch training job with the following command (or alternatively set configs in toml files)

CONFIG_FILE="./train_configs/debug_model.toml" ./run_train.sh --profiling.enable_memory_snapshot --profiling.save_memory_snapshot_folder memory_snapshot
  • --profiling.enable_memory_snapshot: to enable memory profiling
  • --profiling.save_memory_snapshot_folder: configures the folder which memory snapshots are dumped into (./outputs/memory_snapshot/ by default)
    • In case of OOMs, the snapshots will be in ./outputs/memory_snapshot/iteration_x_exit.
    • Regular snapshots (taken every profiling.profile_freq iterations) will be in memory_snapshot/iteration_x.

You can find the saved pickle files in your output folder. To visualize a snapshot file, you can drag and drop it to https://pytorch.org/memory_viz. To learn more details on memory profiling, please visit this tutorial.

Overriding Boolean Flags from .toml via CLI

Boolean flags are treated as actions. To disable a flag from the command line, use the --no prefix.

For example, given the following in your .toml file:

[profiling]
enable_memory_snapshot = true

You can override it at runtime via CLI with:

--profiling.no_enable_memory_snapshot
--profiling.no-enable-memory-snapshot  # Equivalent

Note: --enable_memory_snapshot=False will not work. Use --no_enable_memory_snapshot instead.

Debugging Config Values

To inspect how configuration values are interpreted—including those from .toml files and CLI overrides—run the config manager directly:

python -m torchtitan.config.manager [your cli args...]

For example,

python -m torchtitan.config.manager --job.config_file ./torchtitan/models/llama3/train_configs/llama3_8b.toml --profiling.enable_memory_snapshot

To list all available CLI flags and usage:

python -m torchtitan.config.manager --help

This will print a structured configuration to stdout, allowing you to verify that overrides are being applied correctly.

Troubleshooting jobs that timeout

If you encounter jobs that timeout, you'll need to debug them to identify the root cause. To help with this process, we've enabled Flight Recorder, a tool that continuously collects diagnostic information about your jobs. When a job times out, Flight Recorder automatically generates dump files on every rank containing valuable debugging data. You can find these dump files in the job.dump_folder directory. To learn how to analyze and diagnose issues using these logs, follow our step-by-step tutorial link.

Reproducibility between Runs

When debugging issues with multi-dimensional parallelism (combinations of FSDP, TP, PP, CP, EP), ensuring reproducible behavior is crucial for isolating and fixing problems. torchtitan provides several mechanisms to achieve deterministic training runs. For more information on ensuring reproducibility and managing randomness in PyTorch, you can refer to the official PyTorch documentation on randomness: PyTorch Randomness Documentation.

Seed Configuration

Set consistent random seeds across all parallelism dimensions:

CONFIG_FILE="./torchtitan/models/llama3/train_configs/debug_model.toml" ./run_train.sh --training.seed 42

Seed behavior with parallelism:

  • Data Parallel (DP/FSDP), Tensor Parallel (TP), Context Parallel (CP): All ranks use the same seed.
    • Note: For FSDP and TP, DTensor will do special RNG management to make sure a Replicate tensor get the same init across ranks, but a Shard tensor get "random"-like init across ranks.
  • Pipeline Parallel (PP): Each PP stage gets a different seed to ensure different initialization across layers on different PP ranks.

Deterministic Mode

Enable deterministic algorithms to ensure bit-for-bit reproducibility across runs:

CONFIG_FILE="./torchtitan/models/llama3/train_configs/debug_model.toml" ./run_train.sh --training.deterministic

What it does:

  • Forces all CUDA operations to use deterministic algorithms
  • Disables CuDNN benchmarking and enables deterministic mode
  • Sets deterministic workspace configuration for CuBLAS operations
  • Note: This will significantly reduce training performance but ensures exact reproducibility

Seed-Checkpoint-based Reproducibility

For multiple experimental runs with different parallelism configs, we need to use a "seed" checkpoint to ensure model initializations are the same across runs. This is because in torchtitan/train.py, the model parameters are sharded first, and then have their weights initialized on each rank separately. As a result, it is not equivalent to initialize the model on one rank and then shard it. Using a seed checkpoint helps different runs load the same model weights from checkpoint -- DCP resharding will make sure the loaded weights are sharded correctly according to the parallelism configs.

NGPU=1 CONFIG_FILE="./torchtitan/models/llama3/train_configs/debug_model.toml" ./run_train.sh --checkpoint.enable --checkpoint.create_seed_checkpoint --parallelism.data_parallel_replicate_degree 1 --parallelism.data_parallel_shard_degree 1 --parallelism.tensor_parallel_degree 1 --parallelism.pipeline_parallel_degree 1 --parallelism.context_parallel_degree 1 --parallelism.expert_parallel_degree 1

Note: Using a seed checkpoint will only make sure a model has same initial weights when configs change, but the training process may not be the same even after setting the seed and the deterministic mode, e.g. due to tensor shape change, data precision change, usage of randomness in model code, etc.

Example: Reproducing loss curves with different parallelism configs

A common scenario is when you introduce a new parallelism strategy to the model, you need to ensure that the loss curve remains numerically equivalent to the previous parallelism config, thereby confirming the accuracy of your implementation. To achieve consistent behavior across multiple runs with varying parallelism configurations, it's crucial to make sure dataloader behaves consistently. We need to fix the DP degree (dp_replicate * dpshard) to ensure the dataloader operates consistently.

Here's a typical comparison setup (maintaining an overall DP degree of 4):

  • Run 1: dp_shard = 4
  • Run 2: dp_replicate = 2, dp_shard = 2, TP degree = 2
  • Run 3: dp_replicate = 2, dp_shard = 2, CP degree = 2, PP degree = 2

To reproduce loss curves across above runs, you'll need to create a seed checkpoint, and then load the same seed checkpoint for all runs to ensure consistent model initialization on each rank. You might also need to set the deterministic mode to ensure consistent training behavior.

We also provided an example of verifying the numerical consistency across parallelism plans configs on Llama 3 in https://github.com/pytorch/torchtitan/blob/main/docs/converging.md.