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Run on an on-prem cluster (intermediate)

Run with TorchDistributed

Torch Distributed Run provides helper functions to setup distributed environment variables from the PyTorch distributed communication package that need to be defined on each node.

Once the script is setup like described in :ref:` Training Script Setup<training_script_setup>`, you can run the below command across your nodes to start multi-node training.

Like a custom cluster, you have to ensure that there is network connectivity between the nodes with firewall rules that allow traffic flow on a specified MASTER_PORT.

Finally, you’ll need to decide which node you’d like to be the main node (MASTER_ADDR), and the ranks of each node (NODE_RANK).

For example:

  • MASTER_ADDR 10.10.10.16

  • MASTER_PORT 29500

  • NODE_RANK 0 for the first node, 1 for the second node

Run the below command with the appropriate variables set on each node.

python -m torch.distributed.run
    --nnodes=2 # number of nodes you'd like to run with
    --master_addr <MASTER_ADDR>
    --master_port <MASTER_PORT>
    --node_rank <NODE_RANK>
    train.py (--arg1 ... train script args...)

Note

torch.distributed.run assumes that you’d like to spawn a process per GPU if GPU devices are found on the node. This can be adjusted with -nproc_per_node.


Get help

Setting up a cluster for distributed training is not trivial. Lightning offers lightning-grid which allows you to configure a cluster easily and run experiments via the CLI and web UI.

Try it out for free today: