Frequently Asked Questions

Ray related

How to add breakpoint for debugging with distributed Ray?

Please checkout the official debugging guide from Ray: https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/ray-observability/ray-distributed-debugger.html

“Unable to register worker with raylet”

The cause of this issue is due to some system setting, e.g., SLURM added some constraints on how the CPUs are shared on a node. While ray.init() tries to launch as many worker processes as the number of CPU cores of the machine, some constraints of SLURM restricts the core-workers seeing the raylet process, leading to the problem.

To fix this issue, you can set the config term ray_init.num_cpus to a number allowed by your system.

Distributed training

How to run multi-node post-training with Ray?

You can start a ray cluster and submit a ray job, following the official guide from Ray: https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/ray-core/starting-ray.html

Then in the configuration, set the trainer.nnode config to the number of machines for your job.

How to use verl on a Slurm-managed cluster?

Ray provides users with this official tutorial to start a Ray cluster on top of Slurm. We have verified the GSM8K example on a Slurm cluster under a multi-node setting with the following steps.

1. [Optional] If your cluster support Apptainer or Singularity and you wish to use it, convert verl’s Docker image to an Apptainer image. Alternatively, set up the environment with the package manager available on your cluster or use other container runtimes (e.g. through Slurm’s OCI support) available to you.

apptainer pull /your/dest/dir/vemlp-th2.4.0-cu124-vllm0.6.3-ray2.10-te1.7-v0.0.3.sif docker://verlai/verl:vemlp-th2.4.0-cu124-vllm0.6.3-ray2.10-te1.7-v0.0.3

2. Follow GSM8K example to prepare the dataset and model checkpoints.

3. Modify examples/slurm/ray_on_slurm.slurm with your cluster’s own information.

4. Submit the job script to the Slurm cluster with sbatch.

Please note that Slurm cluster setup may vary. If you encounter any issues, please refer to Ray’s Slurm user guide for common caveats.

If you changed Slurm resource specifications, please make sure to update the environment variables in the job script if necessary.

Install related

NotImplementedError: TensorDict does not support membership checks with the in keyword.

Detail error information:

NotImplementedError: TensorDict does not support membership checks with the `in` keyword. If you want to check if a particular key is in your TensorDict, please use `key in tensordict.keys()` instead.

Cause of the problem: There is no suitable version of tensordict package for the linux-arm64 platform. The confirmation method is as follows:

pip install tensordict==0.6.2

Output example:

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tensordict==0.6.2 (from versions: 0.0.1a0, 0.0.1b0, 0.0.1rc0, 0.0.2a0, 0.0.2b0, 0.0.3, 0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.1.2, 0.8.0, 0.8.1, 0.8.2, 0.8.3)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for tensordict==0.6.2

Solution 1st:

Install tensordict from source code:

pip uninstall tensordict
git clone https://github.com/pytorch/tensordict.git
cd tensordict/
git checkout v0.6.2
python setup.py develop
pip install -v -e .

Solution 2nd:

Temperally modify the error takeplace codes: tensordict_var -> tensordict_var.keys()

Illegal memory access

If you encounter the error message like CUDA error: an illegal memory access was encountered during rollout, most likely it is due to a known issue from vllm(<=0.6.3). Please set the following environment variable. The env var must be set before the ray start command if any.

export VLLM_ATTENTION_BACKEND=XFORMERS

If in doubt, print this env var in each rank to make sure it is properly set.

Checkpoints

If you want to convert the model checkpoint into huggingface safetensor format, please refer to scripts/model_merger.py.

Triton compile_module_from_src error

If you encounter triton compilation error similar to the stacktrace below, please set the use_torch_compile flag according to https://verl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/config.html to disable just-in-time compilation for fused kernels.

File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/runtime/jit.py", line 345, in <lambda>
  return lambda *args, **kwargs: self.run(grid=grid, warmup=False, *args, **kwargs)
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/runtime/autotuner.py", line 338, in run
  return self.fn.run(*args, **kwargs)
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/runtime/jit.py", line 607, in run
  device = driver.active.get_current_device()
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/runtime/driver.py", line 23, in __getattr__
  self._initialize_obj()
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/runtime/driver.py", line 20, in _initialize_obj
  self._obj = self._init_fn()
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/runtime/driver.py", line 9, in _create_driver
  return actives[0]()
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/backends/nvidia/driver.py", line 371, in __init__
  self.utils = CudaUtils()  # TODO: make static
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/backends/nvidia/driver.py", line 80, in __init__
  mod = compile_module_from_src(Path(os.path.join(dirname, "driver.c")).read_text(), "cuda_utils")
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/backends/nvidia/driver.py", line 57, in compile_module_from_src
  so = _build(name, src_path, tmpdir, library_dirs(), include_dir, libraries)
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/site-packages/triton/runtime/build.py", line 48, in _build
  ret = subprocess.check_call(cc_cmd)
File "/data/lbh/conda_envs/verl/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 369, in check_call
  raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)

What is the meaning of train batch size, mini batch size, and micro batch size?

This figure illustrates the relationship between different batch size configurations.

https://excalidraw.com/#json=pfhkRmiLm1jnnRli9VFhb,Ut4E8peALlgAUpr7E5pPCA

How to generate ray timeline to analyse performance of a training job?

To generate the ray timeline file, you can set the config term ray_init.timeline_file to a json file path. For example:

ray_init.timeline_file=/tmp/ray_timeline.json

The file will be generated in the specified path at the end of a training job. You can use tools like chrome://tracing or the Perfetto UI and view the ray timeline file.

This figure shows the ray timeline file generated by from a training job on 1 node with 4 GPUs

How to set proxy only for wandb?

If you need a proxy to access wandb, you can add below config in your training job script. Comparing to using global https_proxy env variable, this approach won’t mess up other http requests, such as ChatCompletionScheduler.

+trainer.wandb_proxy=http://<your proxy and port>