Installation

Before you start, you will need to setup your environment, install the appropriate packages, and configure Accelerate. Accelerate is tested on Python 3.8+.

Accelerate is available on pypi and conda, as well as on GitHub. Details to install from each are below:

pip

To install Accelerate from pypi, perform:

pip install accelerate

conda

Accelerate can also be installed with conda with:

conda install -c conda-forge accelerate

Source

New features are added every day that haven’t been released yet. To try them out yourself, install from the GitHub repository:

pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/accelerate

If you’re working on contributing to the library or wish to play with the source code and see live results as you run the code, an editable version can be installed from a locally-cloned version of the repository:

git clone https://github.com/huggingface/accelerate
cd accelerate
pip install -e .

Configuration

After installing, you need to configure Accelerate for how the current system is setup for training. To do so run the following and answer the questions prompted to you:

accelerate config

To write a barebones configuration that doesn’t include options such as DeepSpeed configuration or running on TPUs, you can quickly run:

python -c "from accelerate.utils import write_basic_config; write_basic_config(mixed_precision='fp16')"

Accelerate will automatically utilize the maximum number of GPUs available and set the mixed precision mode.

To check that your configuration looks fine, run:

accelerate env

An example output is shown below, which describes two GPUs on a single machine with no mixed precision being used:

- `Accelerate` version: 0.11.0.dev0
- Platform: Linux-5.10.0-15-cloud-amd64-x86_64-with-debian-11.3
- Python version: 3.7.12
- Numpy version: 1.19.5
- PyTorch version (GPU?): 1.12.0+cu102 (True)
- `Accelerate` default config:
        - compute_environment: LOCAL_MACHINE
        - distributed_type: MULTI_GPU
        - mixed_precision: no
        - use_cpu: False
        - num_processes: 2
        - machine_rank: 0
        - num_machines: 1
        - main_process_ip: None
        - main_process_port: None
        - main_training_function: main
        - deepspeed_config: {}
        - fsdp_config: {}