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Use checkpoint to enforece the recomputation of fp8 weight
Summary: The issue: When using float8 training with FSDP, we have these tensors in the forward_backward graph:
- Without fp8-all-gather: original_weight (all-gather output, sharded) - fp8_weight - fp8_weight_transpose (needed in backward)
- With fp8-all-gather: original_weight (sharded) - fp8_weight (all-gather output, sharded) - fp8_weight_transpose (needed in backward)
torch.compile
decides how to partition the graph and which tensors to save for backward. In both the case of with and without fp8-all-gather, it decides to save "fp8_weight_transpose" for backward. It's good in single GPU case. However, if we use FSDP to shard the weights, although the weight itself is sharded, the "fp8_weight_transpose" tensors are not. Saving it for backward costs a high memory utilization.
To fix it, we have different options:
- In the user code, enforce which tensors to save for backward
- The
save_for_backward
in custom autograd.Function is one way to specify which tensors to save. However, torch.compile will ignore what are manually saved for backward in a custom autograd.Function, and just run the partitioner. - [This pr] Using "torch.utils.checkpoint", which is the API that compile does promise to respect today. It would instruct compile to only save its inputs for backward (the weight and activation), and not the intermediate values from the float8 cast.
- The
- Rely on torch.compile to find the best partition that optimizes both computation and memory. It may be a very longer-term solution to fix in compile.
Differential Revision: D63345959