README.md

ThunderKittens nanoGPT

This repository contains code for training GPT models with ThunderKittens CUDA kernels for NVidia H100 GPUs. We adapt the popular nanoGPT repository.

Setup

Create an environment and install nanoGPT dependencies:

conda create -n env python=3.12

pip install torch numpy transformers datasets tiktoken wandb tqdm

Install ThunderKittens kernels:

[email protected]:HazyResearch/ThunderKittens.git
cd ThunderKittens/
source env.src

Select "attn" in ThunderKittens/config.py and run:

python setup.py install

Benchmark

Let's first benchmark the kernel to make sure that everything is set up correctly. Prepare data of choice from NanoGPT README below (modify dataset in bench.py path accordingly - default = shakespeare_char). To benchmark the TK Forward Causal Attention, set TK_kernel = True in bench.py and run:

python scripts/bench.py

Note that the code by default uses PyTorch 2.0. At the time of writing (Dec 29, 2022) this makes torch.compile() available in the nightly release. The improvement from the one line of code is noticeable, e.g. cutting down iteration time from ~250ms / iter to 135ms / iter. Nice work PyTorch team!

Run training from scratch

We can train a full model using our kernels:

python data/shakespeare_char/prepare.py # data
python train.py config/train_shakespeare_char.py # train

To scale things up to a larger model and broader pretraining corpus:

python data/openwebtext/prepare.py # data
python train.py config/tk_train_gpt2.py # train

Run inference with a pre-trained model

Here is a script you can use to sample from the largest available gpt2-medium model with and without TK kernels.

python scripts/inference.py

Citations

We build on the nanoGPT repository. To learn more about the repository, please view the original README.