Hi,
I checked the example on github: examples/distributed/ddp at master · pytorch/examples · GitHub 1
I also pasted the example as follows for discussion.
My question is:
should I manually call some API functions to make sure the distributed functionality runs correctly?
such as:
dist.broadcast(indices, 0)
dist.all_reduce(rt, op=dist.ReduceOp.SUM)
I saw some code call those upper APIs manually, but some code didn’t manually call those upper APIs.
Is there any reason why those API should be called and why they are not called?
If broadcast and all_reduce are not called manually, the gradient will be collective for all GPU automatically?
should I initialize all model with the same value in different GPU manually?

def spmd_main(local_world_size, local_rank):
    # These are the parameters used to initialize the process group
    env_dict = {
        key: os.environ[key]
        for key in ("MASTER_ADDR", "MASTER_PORT", "RANK", "WORLD_SIZE")
    }
    print(f"[{os.getpid()}] Initializing process group with: {env_dict}")
    dist.init_process_group(backend="nccl")
    print(
        f"[{os.getpid()}] world_size = {dist.get_world_size()}, "
        + f"rank = {dist.get_rank()}, backend={dist.get_backend()}"
    )

    demo_basic(local_world_size, local_rank)

    # Tear down the process group
    dist.destroy_process_group()

def demo_basic(local_world_size, local_rank):

    # setup devices for this process. For local_world_size = 2, num_gpus = 8,
    # rank 0 uses GPUs [0, 1, 2, 3] and
    # rank 1 uses GPUs [4, 5, 6, 7].
    n = torch.cuda.device_count() // local_world_size
    device_ids = list(range(local_rank * n, (local_rank + 1) * n))

    print(
        f"[{os.getpid()}] rank = {dist.get_rank()}, "
        + f"world_size = {dist.get_world_size()}, n = {n}, device_ids = {device_ids}"
    )

    model = ToyModel().cuda(device_ids[0])
    ddp_model = DDP(model, device_ids)

    loss_fn = nn.MSELoss()
    optimizer = optim.SGD(ddp_model.parameters(), lr=0.001)

    optimizer.zero_grad()
    outputs = ddp_model(torch.randn(20, 10))
    labels = torch.randn(20, 5).to(device_ids[0])
    loss_fn(outputs, labels).backward()
    optimizer.step()