Z1/2 init: flatten params on device #7828
Draft
+155
−23
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This PR addresses FIXME by flattening parameter tensors on the accelerators instead of the CPU during zero stage 1 and 2 initialization. This should alleviate CPU contention, with the caveat that the optimization is only used when there is enough VRAM to allocate a full copy of the parameter buffers.
If necessary, this optimization can be extended to allowed a tiered system that trades off VRAM space with performance, which might look like the following:
The distributed flatten would involve each device flattening a portion of the parameters and performing an all-gather to assemble the full flattened model. See FIXME for original discussion.