Refactor DDP join() API, adding hooks (#60757)
Summary:
Targets https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/54318.
**Overview:**
DDP offers a `join()` context manager to accommodate training on uneven inputs. This creates a new generic `_Join()` API permitting custom hooks, refactors DDP `join()` to call this generic `_Join()`, and implements a hook for ZeRO. (For now, the generic `_Join()` is implemented as private, but this may change after design discussions are cleared.)
There are two classes introduced: `_JoinHook`, the class defining the customizable join hook, and `_Join`, the generic join context manager.
The `_JoinHook` provides two entry points: `main_hook()`, which is called repeatedly while there exists a non-joined process, and `post_hook()`, which is called once all process have joined with the additional `bool` argument `is_last_joiner`. The class also requires `process_group` and `device` information by defining corresponding abstract property methods. Thus, to implement a join hook, (1) inherit from `_JoinHook`, (2) override `main_hook()` and `post_hook()` as appropriate, and (3) override `process_group()` and `device()` to provide process group and device information to be used by the join context manager implementation for collective communications.
The `_Join` constructor requires `join_hooks: List[_JoinHook]` and optionally `enable: bool = True` and `throw_on_early_termination: bool = False`. A training loop only needs to be wrapped with `with _Join(join_hooks):` (using the appropriate `join_hooks`) to be able to train on uneven inputs without hanging/erroring. The context manager requires a `dist.all_reduce(torch.ones(1))` to be called on every non-joined process each time before it performs its collective communications in order to indicate that the process has not yet joined. It also requires that all `process_group` attributes in the `_JoinHook` objects are the same.
**Notes:**
- The argument `is_last_joiner` to `post_hook()` may be useful for finding an authoritative rank when synchronizing.
- `enable` is a flag that can be set to `False` if the user knows the current training loop will not have uneven inputs. This may be used to disable join-related computation in the classes providing join hooks.
- `throw_on_early_termination` is a flag that can be set to `True` to notify processes to terminate upon detecting uneven inputs (i.e. upon the first process joining when there exists a non-joined process). Notably, the notification requires an all-reduce, so to prevent hanging/erroring, non-joined process must participate in the all-reduce. The first-joining process raises a `RuntimeError`, and the other processes are expected (but not required) to do the same. This may be used to implement training on uneven inputs in cases that do not conform to the generic join context manager (e.g. `SyncBatchNorm`).
- Classes providing a join hook should do so via a `_join_hook()` method that returns a `_JoinHook` instance with the methods appropriately overridden.
- If there are multiple join hooks, the device specified by the first is used by the join context manager implementation to perform its collective communications.
- If there are multiple join hooks, both the main and post-hooks are iterated in the order in which the `_JoinHook` objects are passed into the context manager constructor.
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/60757
Test Plan:
The current implementation preserves backward compatibility by not changing the existing DDP `join()` API at all. To check this, I ran through the uneven input tests (`test_ddp_grad_div_uneven_inputs`, `test_ddp_uneven_inputs_stop_iteration_sync_bn`, `test_ddp_uneven_inputs`, `test_ddp_uneven_input_join_disable`, `test_ddp_uneven_input_exception`) on the AI AWS cluster:
```
touch /tmp/barrier && TEMP_DIR="/tmp" BACKEND="nccl" WORLD_SIZE="2" gpurun python test/distributed/test_distributed_fork.py --
```
Because the existing DDP join logic does not provide correct gradients to the joined processes if `gradient_as_bucket_view=False` and a joined process requires those gradients to correctly update its shard of the parameters in `ZeroRedundancyOptimizer.step()`, DDP and ZeRO are not fully compatible at the moment. To work around this and to test ZeRO's join hook separately, I added a test `_test_zero_join()` (with `test_zero_join_gpu()` and `test_zero_join_cpu()` flavors), which compares DDP with a local optimizer on uneven inputs against ZeRO on uneven inputs with the gradients set manually.
Reviewed By: iramazanli, mrshenli
Differential Revision: D29624636
Pulled By: andwgu
fbshipit-source-id: ec70a290e02518b0d8b683f9fed2126705b896c7
