Accelerating your LLM training to full speed

Made with ❤️ by ServiceNow Research

Overview

Fast-LLM is a cutting-edge open-source library for training large language models with exceptional speed, scalability, and flexibility. Built on PyTorch and Triton, Fast-LLM empowers AI teams to push the limits of generative AI, from research to production.

Optimized for training models of all sizes—from small 1B-parameter models to massive clusters with 70B+ parameters—Fast-LLM delivers faster training, lower costs, and seamless scalability. Its fine-tuned kernels, advanced parallelism techniques, and efficient memory management make it the go-to choice for diverse training needs.

As a truly open-source project, Fast-LLM allows full customization and extension without proprietary restrictions. Developed transparently by a community of professionals on GitHub, the library benefits from collaborative innovation, with every change discussed and reviewed in the open to ensure trust and quality. Fast-LLM combines professional-grade tools with unified support for GPT-like architectures, offering the cost efficiency and flexibility that serious AI practitioners demand.

Note

Fast-LLM is not affiliated with Fast.AI, FastHTML, FastAPI, FastText, or other similarly named projects. Our library's name refers to its speed and efficiency in language model training.

Why Fast-LLM?

1. 🚀 Fast-LLM is Blazingly Fast:

   • ⚡️ Optimized kernel efficiency and reduced overheads.
   • 🔋 Optimized memory usage for best performance.
   • ⏳ Minimizes training time and cost.

2. 📈 Fast-LLM is Highly Scalable:

   • 📡 Distributed training across multiple GPUs and nodes using 3D parallelism (Data, Tensor, and Pipeline).
   • 🔗 Supports sequence length parallelism to handle longer sequences effectively.
   • 🧠 ZeRO-1, ZeRO-2, and ZeRO-3 implementations for improved memory efficiency.
   • 🎛️ Mixed precision training support for better performance.
   • 🏋️‍♂️ Large batch training and gradient accumulation support.
   • 🔄 Reproducible training with deterministic behavior.

3. 🎨 Fast-LLM is Incredibly Flexible:

   • 🤖 Compatible with all common language model architectures in a unified class.
   • ⚡ Efficient dropless Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) implementation with SoTA performance.
   • 🧩 Customizable language model architectures, data loaders, loss functions, and optimizers (in progress).
   • 🤗 Seamless integration with Hugging Face Transformers.

4. 🎯 Fast-LLM is Super Easy to Use:

   • 📦 Pre-built Docker images for quick deployment.
   • 📝 Simple YAML configuration for hassle-free setup.
   • 💻 Command-line interface for easy launches.
   • 📊 Detailed logging and real-time monitoring features.
   • 📚 Extensive documentation and practical tutorials (in progress).

5. 🌐 Fast-LLM is Truly Open Source:

   • ⚖️ Licensed under Apache 2.0 for maximum freedom to use Fast-LLM at work, in your projects, or for research.
   • 💻 Transparently developed on GitHub with public roadmap and issue tracking.
   • 🤝 Contributions and collaboration are always welcome!

Usage

We'll walk you through how to use Fast-LLM to train a large language model on a cluster with multiple nodes and GPUs. We'll show an example setup using a Slurm cluster and a Kubernetes cluster.

For this demo, we will train a Mistral-7B model from scratch for 100 steps on random data. The config file examples/mistral-4-node-benchmark.yaml is pre-configured for a multi-node setup with 4 DGX nodes, each with 8 A100-80GB or H100-80GB GPUs.

Note

Fast-LLM scales from a single GPU to large clusters. You can start small and expand based on your resources.

Expect to see a significant speedup in training time compared to other libraries! For training Mistral-7B, Fast-LLM is expected to achieve a throughput of 9,800 tokens/s/H100 (batch size 32, sequence length 8k) on a 4-node cluster with 32 H100s.

Running Fast-LLM on a Slurm Cluster

Prerequisites

• A Slurm cluster with at least 4 DGX nodes with 8 A100-80GB or H100-80GB GPUs each.
• CUDA 12.1 or higher.
• Dependencies: PyTorch, Triton, and Apex installed on all nodes.

Steps

1. Deploy the nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch:24.07-py3 Docker image to all nodes (recommended), because it contains all the necessary dependencies.

2. Install Fast-LLM on all nodes:

   sbatch <<EOF
   #!/bin/bash
   #SBATCH --nodes=$(scontrol show node | grep -c NodeName)
   #SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
   #SBATCH --ntasks=$(scontrol show node | grep -c NodeName)
   #SBATCH --exclusive
   
   srun bash -c 'pip install --no-cache-dir -e "git+https://github.com/ServiceNow/Fast-LLM.git#egg=llm[CORE,OPTIONAL,DEV]"'
   EOF

3. Use the example Slurm job script examples/fast-llm.sbat to submit the job to the cluster:

   sbatch examples/fast-llm.sbat

4. Monitor the job's progress:

   • Logs: Follow job_output.log and job_error.log in your working directory for logs.
   • Status: Use squeue -u $USER to see the job status.

Now, you can sit back and relax while Fast-LLM trains your model at full speed! ☕

Running Fast-LLM on a Kubernetes Cluster

Prerequisites

• A Kubernetes cluster with at least 4 DGX nodes with 8 A100-80GB or H100-80GB GPUs each.
• KubeFlow installed.
• Locked memory limit set to unlimited at the host level on all nodes. Ask your cluster admin to do this if needed.

Steps

1. Create a Kubernetes PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) named fast-llm-home that will be mounted to /home/fast-llm in the container using examples/fast-llm-pvc.yaml:

   kubectl apply -f examples/fast-llm-pvc.yaml

2. Create a PyTorchJob resource using the example configuration file examples/fast-llm.pytorchjob.yaml:

   kubectl apply -f examples/fast-llm.pytorchjob.yaml

3. Monitor the job status:

   • Use kubectl get pytorchjobs to see the job status.
   • Use kubectl logs -f fast-llm-master-0 -c pytorch to follow the logs.

That's it! You're now up and running with Fast-LLM on Kubernetes. 🚀

Next Steps

📖 Want to learn more? Check out our documentation for more information on how to use Fast-LLM.

🔨 We welcome contributions to Fast-LLM! Have a look at our contribution guidelines.

🐞 Something doesn't work? Open an issue!

License

Fast-LLM is licensed by ServiceNow, Inc. under the Apache 2.0 License. See LICENSE for more information.

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