Accelerate ND-Parallel: A Guide to Efficient Multi-GPU Training

Hugging Face Accelerate, in collaboration with Axolotl, introduces ND-Parallelism to simplify efficient multi-GPU training. This feature enables the combination of various parallelism strategies, including Data Parallelism (DP), Fully Sharded Data Parallelism (FSDP), Tensor Parallelism (TP), and Context Parallelism (CP). The guide provides practical Python and YAML code examples for configuring these combined strategies using Accelerate's `ParallelismConfig` or Axolotl's configuration files. It also explains the core concepts behind these techniques, such as how DP replicates the model while FSDP shards model parameters across devices to handle larger models.