ColossalAI/docs/source/en/features/nvme_offload.md

# NVMe offload

Author: Hongxin Liu

**Prerequisite:**
- [Zero Redundancy Optimizer with chunk-based memory management](../features/zero_with_chunk.md)

**Related Paper**

- [ZeRO-Offload: Democratizing Billion-Scale Model Training](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06840)
- [ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning](https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07857)

## Introduction

If a model has `N` parameters, when using Adam, it has `8N` optimizer states. For billion-scale models, optimizer states take at least 32 GB memory. GPU memory limits the model scale we can train, which is called GPU memory wall. If we offload optimizer states to the disk, we can break through GPU memory wall.

We implement a user-friendly and efficient asynchronous Tensor I/O library: [TensorNVMe](https://github.com/hpcaitech/TensorNVMe). With this library, we can simply implement NVMe offload.

> This library is compatible with all kinds of disk (HDD, SATA SSD, and NVMe SSD). As I/O bandwidth of HDD or SATA SSD is low, it's recommended to use this lib only on NVMe disk.

When optimizing a parameter, we can divide the optimization process into three stages: read, compute and offload. We perform the optimization process in a pipelined fashion, which can overlap computation and I/O.

<figure style={{textAlign: "center"}}>
<img src="https://s2.loli.net/2022/08/16/CvRnowrsNyB4hza.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Optimization process</figcaption>
</figure>

## Usage

First, please make sure you installed [TensorNVMe](https://github.com/hpcaitech/TensorNVMe):

```shell
pip install packaging
pip install tensornvme
```

We implement NVMe offload of optimizer states for Adam ([CPUAdam](https://colossalai.readthedocs.io/en/latest/colossalai/colossalai.nn.optimizer.cpu_adam.html) and [HybridAdam](https://colossalai.readthedocs.io/en/latest/colossalai/colossalai.nn.optimizer.hybrid_adam.html)).

```python
from colossalai.nn.optimizer import CPUAdam, HybridAdam

optimizer = HybridAdam(model.parameters(), lr=1e-3, nvme_offload_fraction=1.0, nvme_offload_dir='./')
```

`nvme_offload_fraction` is the fraction of optimizer states to be offloaded to NVMe. `nvme_offload_dir` is the directory to save NVMe offload files. If `nvme_offload_dir` is `None`, a random temporary directory will be used.

It's compatible with all parallel methods in ColossalAI.