Hi, TCP initialization should not be deprecated and you should be able to use TCP initialization as per the documentation here: Distributed communication package - torch.distributed — PyTorch 1.7.0 documentation 64.
In order to debug the file initialization issue, could you paste the specific exception stack that you’re running into? Would be very helpful to understand the exact sort of error that is expected.
However, looking at your current code I’m not sure if the process group initialization is set up correctly. The server appears to use a file (which should be a shared networked file handle as you mention) but the client appears to use environment variable initialization with a master address and port. All participating processes should use the same init.