Trainer is a more high-level wrapper for the user to execute training with fewer lines of code. However, in pursuit of more abstraction, it loses some flexibility compared to engine. The trainer is designed to execute a forward and backward step to perform model weight update. It is easy to create a trainer object by passing the engine object. The trainer has a default value `None` for the argument `schedule`. In most cases, we leave this value to `None` unless we want to use pipeline parallelism. If you wish to explore more about this parameter, you can go to the tutorial on pipeline parallelism.
# build components and initialize with colossalai.initialize
...
# create a logger so that trainer can log on the console
logger = get_dist_logger()
# create a trainer object
trainer = Trainer(
engine=engine,
logger=logger
)
```
In trainer, the user can customize some hooks and attach these hooks to the trainer object. A hook object will execute life-cycle methods periodically based on the training scheme. For example, The `LRSchedulerHook` will execute `lr_scheduler.step()` to update the learning rate of the model during either `after_train_iter` or `after_train_epoch` stages depending on whether the user wants to update the learning rate after each training iteration or only after the entire training epoch. You can store the hook objects in a list and pass it to `trainer.fit` method. `trainer.fit` method will execute training and testing based on your parameters. If `display_process` is True, a progress bar will be displayed on your console to show the training process.
If you want to customize your own hook class, you can inherit `hooks.BaseHook` and override the life-cycle methods of your interest. A dummy example to demonstrate how to create a simple log message hook is provided below for your reference.
In the sections below, I will guide you through the steps required to train a ResNet model with both engine and trainer.
## Explain with ResNet
### Overview
In this section we will cover:
1. Use an engine object to train a ResNet34 model on CIFAR10 dataset
2. Use a trainer object to train a ResNet34 model on CIFAR10 dataset
The project structure will be like:
```bash
-- config.py
-- run_resnet_cifar10_with_engine.py
-- run_resnet_cifar10_with_trainer.py
```
Steps 1-4 below are commonly used regardless of using engine or trainer. Thus, steps 1-4 + step 5 will be your `run_resnet_cifar10_with_engine.py` and steps 1-4 + step 6 will form `run_resnet_cifar10_with_trainer.py`.
### Hands-on Practice
#### Step 1. Create a Config File
In your project folder, create a `config.py`. This file is to specify some features you may want to use to train your model. A sample config file is as below:
```python
from colossalai.amp import AMP_TYPE
BATCH_SIZE = 128
NUM_EPOCHS = 200
fp16=dict(
mode=AMP_TYPE.TORCH
)
```
In this config file, we specify that we want to use batch size 128 per GPU and run for 200 epochs. These two parameters are exposed by `gpc.config`. For example, you can use `gpc.config.BATCH_SIZE` to access the value you store in your config file. The `fp16` configuration tells `colossalai.initialize` to use mixed precision training provided by PyTorch to train the model with better speed and lower memory consumption.
#### Step 2. Initialize Distributed Environment
We need to initialize the distributed training environment. This has been introduced in the tutorial on how to
In this step, we can create all the components used for training. These components include:
1. Model
2. Optimizer
3. Criterion/loss function
4. Training/Testing dataloaders
5. Learning rate Scheduler
6. Logger
To build these components, you need to import the following modules:
```python
from pathlib import Path
from colossalai.logging import get_dist_logger
import torch
import os
from colossalai.core import global_context as gpc
from colossalai.utils import get_dataloader
from torchvision import transforms
from colossalai.nn.lr_scheduler import CosineAnnealingLR
from torchvision.datasets import CIFAR10
from torchvision.models import resnet34
```
Then build your components in the same way as how to normally build them in your PyTorch scripts. In the script below, we set the root path for CIFAR10 dataset as an environment variable `DATA`. You can change it to any path you like, for example, you can change `root=Path(os.environ['DATA'])` to `root='./data'` so that there is no need to set the environment variable.
Next, the essential step is to obtain the engine class by calling `colossalai.initialize`. As stated in `config.py`, we will be using mixed precision training for training ResNet34 model. `colossalai.initialize` will automatically check your config file and assign relevant features to your training components. In this way, our engine object has already been able to train with mixed precision, but you do not have to explicitly take care of it.
Lastly, we can invoke the scripts using the distributed launcher provided by PyTorch as we used `launch_from_torch` in Step 2. You need to replace `<num_gpus>` with the number of GPUs available on your machine. This number can be 1 if you only want to use 1 GPU. If you wish to use other launchers, you can refer to the tutorial on How to Launch Colossal-AI.
