---
local: distributed-training-with-accelerate
sections:
- local: setup
  title: Setup
- local: prepare-to-accelerate
  title: Prepare to accelerate
- local: backward
  title: Backward
- local: train
  sections:
  - local: train-with-a-script
    title: Train with a script
  - local: train-with-a-notebook
    title: Train with a notebook
  title: Train
title: Distributed training with 🤗 Accelerate
---
<script>
import Tip from "./Tip.svelte";
import Youtube from "./Youtube.svelte";
import Docstring from "./Docstring.svelte";
import CodeBlock from "./CodeBlock.svelte";
import CodeBlockFw from "./CodeBlockFw.svelte";
import DocNotebookDropdown from "./DocNotebookDropdown.svelte";
import IconCopyLink from "./IconCopyLink.svelte";
export let fw: "pt" | "tf"
</script>
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<h1 id="distributed-training-with-accelerate">Distributed training with 🤗 Accelerate</h1>

As models get bigger, parallelism has emerged as a strategy for training larger models on limited hardware and accelerating training speed by several orders of magnitude. At Hugging Face, we created the [🤗 Accelerate](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/index.html) library to help users easily train a 🤗 Transformers model on any type of distributed setup, whether it is multiple GPU's on one machine or multiple GPU's across several machines. In this tutorial, learn how to customize your native PyTorch training loop to enable training in a distributed environment.

<h2 id="setup">Setup</h2>

Get started by installing 🤗 Accelerate:

```bash
pip install accelerate
```

Then import and create an [`Accelerator`](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/accelerator.html#accelerate.Accelerator) object. `Accelerator` will automatically detect your type of distributed setup and initialize all the necessary components for training. You don't need to explicitly place your model on a device.

```py
>>> from accelerate import Accelerator

>>> accelerator = Accelerator()
```

<h2 id="prepare-to-accelerate">Prepare to accelerate</h2>

The next step is to pass all the relevant training objects to the [`prepare`](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/accelerator.html#accelerate.Accelerator.prepare) method. This includes your training and evaluation DataLoaders, a model and an optimizer:

```py
>>> train_dataloader, eval_dataloader, model, optimizer = accelerator.prepare(
...     train_dataloader, eval_dataloader, model, optimizer
... )
```

<h2 id="backward">Backward</h2>

The last addition is to replace the typical `loss.backward()` in your training loop with 🤗 Accelerate's [`backward`](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/accelerator.html#accelerate.Accelerator.backward) method:

```py
>>> for epoch in range(num_epochs):
...     for batch in train_dataloader:
...         outputs = model(**batch)
...         loss = outputs.loss
...         accelerator.backward(loss)

...         optimizer.step()
...         lr_scheduler.step()
...         optimizer.zero_grad()
...         progress_bar.update(1)
```

As you can see in the following code, you only need to add four additional lines of code to your training loop to enable distributed training!

```diff
+ from accelerate import Accelerator
  from transformers import AdamW, AutoModelForSequenceClassification, get_scheduler

+ accelerator = Accelerator()

  model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(checkpoint, num_labels=2)
  optimizer = AdamW(model.parameters(), lr=3e-5)

- device = torch.device("cuda") if torch.cuda.is_available() else torch.device("cpu")
- model.to(device)

+ train_dataloader, eval_dataloader, model, optimizer = accelerator.prepare(
+     train_dataloader, eval_dataloader, model, optimizer
+ )

  num_epochs = 3
  num_training_steps = num_epochs * len(train_dataloader)
  lr_scheduler = get_scheduler(
      "linear",
      optimizer=optimizer,
      num_warmup_steps=0,
      num_training_steps=num_training_steps
  )

  progress_bar = tqdm(range(num_training_steps))

  model.train()
  for epoch in range(num_epochs):
      for batch in train_dataloader:
-         batch = &amp;lcub;k: v.to(device) for k, v in batch.items()}
          outputs = model(**batch)
          loss = outputs.loss
-         loss.backward()
+         accelerator.backward(loss)

          optimizer.step()
          lr_scheduler.step()
          optimizer.zero_grad()
          progress_bar.update(1)
```

<h2 id="train">Train</h2>

Once you've added the relevant lines of code, launch your training in a script or a notebook like Colaboratory.

<h3 id="train-with-a-script">Train with a script</h3>

If you are running your training from a script, run the following command to create and save a configuration file:

```bash
accelerate config
```

Then launch your training with:

```bash
accelerate launch train.py
```

<h3 id="train-with-a-notebook">Train with a notebook</h3>

🤗 Accelerate can also run in a notebook if you're planning on using Colaboratory's TPUs. Wrap all the code responsible for training in a function, and pass it to `notebook_launcher`:

```py
>>> from accelerate import notebook_launcher

>>> notebook_launcher(training_function)
```

For more information about 🤗 Accelerate and it's rich features, refer to the [documentation](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/index.html).