🎰 Deterministic flash-attn

Author

Affiliation

Sam Foreman

ALCF

[NOTE]: For additional details, refer to the W&B Report.

Simple tests to confirm the loss is exactly reproducible across independent runs (when launched with the same seed).

• In particular, we set:

  output = flash_attn_func(q, k, v, None, self.causal, deterministic=True)

  in all the flash_attn_func(...) calls from megatron/model/transformer.py

• All experiments ran on Polaris @ ALCF, using:

  machine: Polaris
  args.zero_stage: 1
  args.num_layers: 32
  args.micro_batch_size: 1
  args.optimizer: "adamw"
  args.use_flash_attn: true
  env.DFL_STEM: "books"
  env.GRAD_ACC_STEPS: 8
  env.WORLD_SIZE: 8

Figure 1: Plot of the loss curve for 3 independent runs with deterministic=True