Interesting. I’ll try on my infrastructure to see. On the one hand, auto_dataloader scales num_workers per process by the number of local processes: auto_dataloader — PyTorch-Ignite v0.4.6 Documentation
        if "num_workers" in kwargs and kwargs["num_workers"] >= nproc:
            kwargs["num_workers"] = (kwargs["num_workers"] + nproc - 1) // nproc

You can see the number of workers the logger is reporting. If num_workers > 8, then it is scaled by nproc_per_node. Otherwise, it will use the number itself. Probable, if you set num_workers=1, it should run as well.
On the other hand, each process of 8 ( nproc_per_node) on the machine will create a dataloader which will also spawn workers. Maybe, the system can not spawn that much ?
Sometimes, it can help to increase shm size if running in docker container with the flag --shm-size 16G
EDIT: Updated Colab to run resnet18 on cifar10 with 8 procs and 10 workers, seems like running.