Horovod is the distributed training framework developed by Uber. It support training distributed programs with little modification for both TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet and keras.

# Basic concepts of MPI

For distributed training, horovod relies on MPI or Gloo, both of which are libraries developed for parallel computing. The underlying concepts may be similar.

Communicator: this is a common world for a group of processes. Each process inside the communicator has its rank, which is a unique id used by MPI to identify a particular process.

Point-to-point communication: it means that a process interacts with another process directly in the communicator.

Collective operation: A MPI collective operation involves all the processes in a communicator. These operations include broadcast, gather, scatter, reduce, etc.

## The meaning of some collective operations

• Broadcast means to copy the same data from the root process to the other processes.
• Gather means to take data from other processes and put them in the root process.
• Scatter means to slice the dataset in root process to several parts and distribute one part to each process.
• Reduce means to perform some sort of action (sum, max, min, etc.) on the data from all processes and put the result in the root process.
• Allreduce is based on reduce operation and it copies the result to other processes.

# What are world size, rank, local rank?

First, the meaning of world in distributed scenario:

By default, collectives are executed on all the processes, also known as world.

In PyTorch, distributed training using torch.dist.DistributedParallel, the number of spawned processed equals to the number of GPUs you want to use. Rank is the unique id given to each process, and local rank is the local id for GPUs in the same node.

For example, if you want to use 2 nodes and 4 GPUs per node, then 2*4 =8 processes will be spawned. World size is 8. In node 1, the process rank is 0, 1, 2, 3, and in node 2, the process rank is 4, 5, 6, 7. In both the two nodes, local rank would be 0, 1, 2, 3.

In horovod, the concept is similar. Usually, each GPU corresponds to one process. Size is equal to the number of processes.

# How does batch size and multi-GPU training work together?

In PyTorch, for single node, multi-GPU training (i.e., using torch.nn.DataParallel), the data batch is split in the first dimension, which means that you should multiply your original batch size (for single node single GPU training) by the number of GPUs you want to use if you want to the original batch size for one GPU.

For multi-node, multi-GPU training using horovod, the situation is different. In this case, we first need to use a DistributedSampler() like the following command:

train_sampler = torch.utils.data.distributed.DistributedSampler(
train_dataset, num_replicas=hvd.size(), rank=hvd.rank())


In the above statement, the parameter num_replicas is the world size, and parameter rank is the global rank (in contrast to the local rank) of current process. But how does a DistributedSampler work?

You can find the source code of DistributedSampler here. According to the code, roughly speaking, it splits the dataset into num_replicas parts, and according to its rank, each process get a part of the original indexes of the dataset:

indices  =  indices[self.rank:self.total_size:self.num_replicas]


In the end, this sampler gets len(dataset)/num_replicas samples.

In the dataloader part, we need to use this distributed sampler instead of the plain simple sampler:

kwargs = {'num_workers': 4, 'pin_memory': True} if args.cuda else {}

The size of this train_loader, i.e., the number of iterations for a single process, is len(dataset)/(num_replicas*batch_size). In a one node one GPU scenario, the dataloader size is usually len(dataset)/batch_size. So in a distributed scenario, the number of iterations for a single process is the number of the iterations in one node one GPU case divided by num_replica. By iterating over their respective data part, all the processes have finished one epoch in the whole dataset.