Emergency checkpointing

Emergency checkpointing#

Emergency checkpointing is a vital feature for large-scale, multi-slice training. It enables rapid saving and restoration of model state from local, in-memory checkpoints in response to hardware failures, host errors, or preemptions. This feature becomes increasingly critical as the number of hosts and devices grows, which raises the probability of a failure.

Assumptions#

GKE Environment: A Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster must be used. GCE infrastructure solutions like QueuedResources are not supported.
Multi-Tier Checkpointing Enabled on GKE cluster level: The Multi-Tier Checkpointing feature must be enabled and configured on your GKE cluster. This involves setting up the necessary CSI drivers and configurations as outlined in the Google Cloud Checkpointing Documentation.
Multi-Slice Workload: The training job must be a multi-slice environment, meaning it utilizes more than one node pool.
Orbax Checkpointer: The Orbax library must be used for checkpointing in your training script.
Ramdisk Mounted via Jobset: Each workload pod must have a ramdisk directory mounted by Jobset using the Multi-Tier Checkpointing CSI driver. This provides a high-speed, in-memory storage location for checkpoints.
Supported TPU types: v4, v5e, v5p, and v6e

Cluster creation using XPK#

To run workloads with Emergency Checkpointing, you need a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster with the necessary drivers and features enabled. You can create a properly configured cluster using the XPK or by setting it up manually with gcloud commands following Google Cloud Checkpointing Documentation.

The xpk script provides a streamlined way to create a GKE cluster with all the required MTC settings. The key flags used are:

--enable-mtc: Enables the Multi-Tier Checkpointing feature.
--enable-gcsfuse-csi-driver: Installs the required GCS FUSE CSI driver.
--mtc-ramdisk-size: Allocates an in-memory ramdisk on each node for fast, local checkpoints.
--mtc-gcs-bucket: Specifies the GCS bucket. It is not utilized in emergency checkpointing, but is needed to deploy checkpointing configurations.

Calculating ramdisk size per host#

The total size of a full training checkpoint (including model weights and optimizer state) can be estimated based on the number of model parameters. A good rule of thumb: Total Checkpoint Size ≈ Number of Parameters × 12 bytes

For example, a 1 billion parameter model would require approximately 1B × 12 bytes = 12 GB for a full checkpoint.

In a distributed training environment, the checkpoint is sharded, or split, across all the hosts in a slice. Each host is only responsible for saving its portion of the total checkpoint. Therefore, the ramdisk on a single pod only needs to be large enough for its local shard.

The formula is: Required Ramdisk Size per Pod ≈ 2 * ( Total Checkpoint Size / Number of Hosts in the Slice)

It’s a good practice to add a 10-15% buffer .

Example calculation#

Let’s walk through an example for a large model.

Model: A 70 billion parameter language model.
Training Slice: A nodepool with 32 hosts.

Estimate Total Checkpoint Size: 70,000,000,000 parameters × 12 bytes/parameter = 840,000,000,000 bytes 840,000,000,000 bytes ≈ 840 GB
Calculate Per-Host Checkpoint shard: (Total Checkpoint Size / 32 hosts) = 26.25 GB per host
Calculate Per-Host Ramdisk Size: (Per-Host Checkpoint shard) * 2 = 52.50 GB per host
Add a Safety Buffer (e.g., 15%): (Per-Host Ramdisk Size) × 1.15 ≈ 60.3 GB

In this scenario, you should configure each pod in that slice with a ramdisk of at least 60 GB.

Example XPK cluster creation command#

Set up environment variables:

OUTPUT_PATH=<gcs bucket output path>
PROJECT_ID=<project id>
ZONE=<your zone>
CLUSTER_NAME=<cluster name>
TPU_TYPE=<tpu-type> #example: v6e-256
MACHINE_TYPE=<cpu machine-type>
NUM_SLICES=<number of slices>
RAMDISK_SIZE=<ramdisk size> #example: 60000Mi
GKE_VERSION=<gke version> #example: 1.32.3-gke.1785000

Configure gcloud:

gcloud config set project ${PROJECT_ID?}
gcloud config set compute/zone ${ZONE?}

Clone the XPK repository:

git clone [https://github.com/AI-Hypercomputer/xpk.git](https://github.com/AI-Hypercomputer/xpk.git)

Run the cluster creation command:

python3 xpk/xpk.py cluster create \
--cluster ${CLUSTER_NAME?} \
--cluster-cpu-machine-type=${MACHINE_TYPE?} \
--num-slices=${NUM_SLICES?} \
--tpu-type=${TPU_TYPE?} \
--enable-mtc \
--enable-gcsfuse-csi-driver \
--mtc-ramdisk-size=${RAMDISK_SIZE?} \
--mtc-gcs-bucket=${OUTPUT_PATH?} \
--gke-version=${GKE_VERSION?}

MaxText configuration#

MaxText provides a set of configuration flags to control checkpointing options. This configuration manages a two-tiered checkpointing system designed for both durability and rapid recovery.

Local Emergency Checkpoints: It saves checkpoints much more frequently to a fast, local directory on each host (i.e. a ramdisk). If a preemption or failure occurs, the job can restore from this recent local copy, minimizing lost work without needing to download from slower persistent storage. This feature is enabled by setting enable_checkpointing, enable_emergency_checkpoint, local_checkpoint_directory and a non-zero local_checkpoint_period.
Persistent Checkpoints: These are standard checkpoints saved periodically and much more rarely to durable storage(i.e. GCS bucket). They ensure that you can recover your training state even after a complete cluster failure. This is controlled by enable_checkpointing, and checkpoint_period.

Flag	Description	Type	Default
`enable_checkpointing`	A master switch to enable (`True`) or disable (`False`) saving checkpoints during the training run.	`boolean`	`False`
`enable_emergency_checkpoint`	When set to (`True`), this flag enables the two-tiered emergency checkpointing feature.	`boolean`	`False`
`async_checkpointing`	When set to (`True`), this flag makes checkpoint saving asynchronous. The training step is only blocked for the minimal time needed to capture the model’s state, and the actual writing to storage happens in a background thread. This is highly recommended for performance. It’s enabled by default.	`boolean`	`True`
`local_checkpoint_directory`	The high-speed local filesystem path(i.e. ramdisk) where emergency checkpoints are saved. Setting this path, along with a non-zero `local_checkpoint_period`, enables the emergency checkpointing feature.	`string`	`""`
`local_checkpoint_period`	The interval, in training steps, for how often a local checkpoint is saved. This should be set to a much smaller value than `checkpoint_period` for frequent, low-overhead saves.	`integer`	`0`
`checkpoint_period`	The interval, in training steps, for how often a checkpoint is saved to persistent storage.	`integer`	`10000`
`enable_single_replica_ckpt_restoring`	If `True`, one replica reads the checkpoint from storage and then broadcasts it to all other replicas. This can significantly speed up restoration on multi-host systems by reducing redundant reads from storage.	`boolean`	`False`
`enable_autocheckpoint`	If `True`, enables saving a checkpoint when a preemption signal (SIGTERM) is received. This is a reactive mechanism that saves to persistent storage.	`boolean`	`False`

Autocheckpoint vs. Emergency Checkpointing#

While both features aim to protect against progress loss, they operate differently:

Autocheckpoint (enable_autocheckpoint): A reactive mechanism. When the infrastructure sends a SIGTERM signal (indicating imminent preemption or maintenance), MaxText immediately attempts to save a checkpoint to persistent storage (GCS). It is best for handling planned maintenance or preemptions where a short grace period is provided.
Emergency Checkpointing (enable_emergency_checkpoint): A proactive mechanism. It saves checkpoints very frequently to local, high-speed storage (ramdisk). If a failure occurs without warning, the job can recover from the most recent local checkpoint. It is best for handling sudden hardware failures.

For maximum reliability, both features can be enabled simultaneously.

Workload creation using XPK#

The flags below would give the user access to the ramdisk in their workload:

Flag	Description
`--mtc-enabled`	Enables the Multi-Tier Checkpointing feature, by mounting ramdisk to the workload pods, using csi drivers.
`--ramdisk-directory`	Specifies the mount path inside each pod where the high-speed ramdisk will be accessible. Your training application should write its local, emergency checkpoints to this path.

Example XPK workload creation command#