[FSDP] Introduce "fully sharded module"; remove comm. module (#90933)
This PR removes the "communication module" (comm. module / `comm_module`) concept from the FSDP code base since it causes disproportionate confusion compared to its benefit for now.
Instead, we introduce the term "fully sharded module" as the single concept to unify the wrapper and non-wrapper code paths. The definition is presented in a note at the top of `flat_param.py`. I reproduce it here:
---
We define the **"fully sharded module"** to be the original `nn.Module` that owns a `FlatParamHandle`. It is the *single* module logically responsible for the *single* unshard/reshard pair for the handle's `FlatParameter` for a given forward or backward pass. The fully sharded module should be passed to the `FlatParamHandle` constructor.
For the wrapper code path:
- The `FullyShardedDataParallel` module wrapping the fully sharded module runs the unshard/reshard on behalf of the fully sharded module by overriding `nn.Module.forward`.
- The fully sharded module is exactly the module passed to the `FullyShardedDataParallel` constructor's `module` argument and is saved in `_fsdp_wrapped_module`.
For the non-wrapper code path:
- Hooks registered on the fully sharded module run the unshard/reshard.
- The fully sharded module may either be the direct argument to `fully_shard` or a submodule chosen by the provided wrapping policy.
---
After this PR, `handle.flat_param._fqns`, `_param_infos`, and `_shared_param_infos` all prefix names from the same module, namely the fully sharded module. This should make state dict less confusing.
---
As an example, consider:
```
mod: Module(
sub1: Submodule(
subsub1: Subsubmodule(),
subsub2: Subsubmodule(),
),
sub2: Submodule(
subsub1: Subsubmodule(),
subsub2: Subsubmodule(),
),
)
```
For wrapper FSDP manual wrap:
```
mod.sub1 = FSDP(mod.sub1)
mod.sub2 = FSDP(mod.sub2)
mod = FSDP(mod)
```
For wrapper FSDP auto wrap:
```
mod = FSDP(mod, auto_wrap_policy=ModuleWrapPolicy({Submodule}))
```
(WIP) For non-wrapper FSDP manual wrap:
```
fully_shard(mod.sub1)
fully_shard(mod.sub2)
fully_shard(mod)
```
For non-wrapper FSDP auto wrap:
```
fully_shard(mod, policy=ModuleWrapPolicy({Submodule}))
```
The fully sharded module **in all cases** are `mod`, `mod.sub1`, `mod.sub2`, and notably, `subsub1` and `subsub2`s are not fully sharded modules.
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/90933
Approved by: https://github.com/rohan-varma
pytorch
8cd1808d - [FSDP] Introduce "fully sharded module"; remove comm. module (#90933)
