Nanotron

Nanotron is a distributed training framework with tensor, parallel, and data parallelism (3D parallelism). It is designed for large-scale training workloads across hundreds of GPUs.

Convert any Transformers model to an optimized Nanotron transformer model implementation for pretraining with the convert_hf_to_nanotron.py script.

torchrun --nproc_per_node=1 examples/llama/convert_hf_to_nanotron.py \
    --checkpoint_path=meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf \
    --save_path=./llama-7b-nanotron

Transformers integration

1. Load a supported Transformers model, like [Llama], with the [~LlamaForCausalLM.from_pretrained] function. This reads the config.json file from the checkpoint directory and creates a [LlamaConfig].
2. Nanotron maps [LlamaConfig] to it's own config format and creates a Nanotron model.
3. Convert Transformers weights to Nanotron. A weight mapping guides how to map Nanotron parameter names to Transformers parameter names. This includes handling transformations such as fusing the QKV projections and the gate/up projections.

Nanotron also relies on [AutoTokenizer] for turning text into token ids during preprocessing and generation.

Resources

• Nanontron repository
• Ultrascale Playbook describes how to efficiently scale training with Nanotron