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FLM-101B: An Open LLM and How to Train It with $100K Budget

FLM-101B is an open-source decoder-only LLM with 101 billion parameters. During the training process, model growth technique was employed. The model rapidly acquires knowledge on a small-scale model(16B) in the early stages of training and gradually scales up to 101B, resulting in a cost-effective 100B-scale LLM training(costing approximately $100,000). FLM-101B supports both Chinese and English languages. It has a context window length of 2048 in training. Thanks to the use of xPos rotary position embedding, it allows for efficient expansion of the window size during inference.

To advance the development of 100B-scale Large Language Models (LLMs), FLM-101B has now been fully open-sourced.

As part of the FLM-101B open source project, this code repository is the training framework for FLM-101B. It is a detached fork of Meagtron-LM. On this basis, we have carried out some development and optimization, including but not limited to: adding FreeLM model training method, Loss Prediction, xPos, and a new configurable dataloader system, etc.

We have prepared a comprehensive code repository that is essential to our paper's main claims. The reproduction code has been released at https://huggingface.co/CofeAI/FLM-101B. And this repository(FLM-101B) is the pre-training code. We intend to make the complete repository publicly accessible upon the publication of our paper.

Why use FLM-101B

• It's an open-source 100B scaled Chinese-English bilingual model.
• It's the largest known language model trained with xPos.
• It's the largest known language model that successfully implements μp transfer and loss prediction.
• It's the largest known language model that successfully implements progressive learning with model growth.

Parallel Strategies & HFU(Hardware FLOPs Utilization)

This training framework supports training of models with three parameter sizes mentioned in our paper: 16B, 51B and 101B. Theoretically, it can support the training of TB-level models (but the convergence has not been confirmed experimentally). We conducted actual training experiments on a cluster of 24 x NVIDIA A800 GPUs. The following table shows our actual FLM-101B configured parallel strategy scheme and floating point computing efficiency.

Params(billion)	TP Size	PP Size	DP Size	Number of GPUs	Batch Size	TFLOP/s per GPU	GPU Utilization
16	2	1	96	192	2304	162	51.90%
51	4	2	24	192	2304	160	51.30%
101	4	4	12	192	2160	165	52.88%

System Requirements

Hardware requirements

FLM-101B requires to run on a NVIDIA-A100/A800-GPU-equipped cluster. Typically, in order to support large model training, we recommend that the configuration is no less than:

• Total number of cluster nodes: 16
• GPUs per node: 8
• Memory per node: 1TB
• Inter-GPU communication solution: NVLink
• Inter-Node communication solution: InfiniBand (400/800 Gb/s)

Software requirements

OS Requirements

This package is supported for Linux. The package has been tested on the following systems: Linux: Ubuntu 20.04

Python Dependencies

FLM-101B mainly depends on: requirements.txt and apex package.

Installation Guide

1. Install apex

git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex
cd apex
pip install --global-option="--cpp_ext" --global-option="--cuda_ext" --no-cache -v --disable-pip-version-check .  2>&1 | tee build.log

2. Install cofe-ai/FLM-101B

git clone https://github.com/cofe-ai/FLM-101B.git
cd FLM-101B
pip install -r requirements.txt

Important Methods

• Extrapolatable Position Embedding (xPos)
• Flash Attention (In Training)
• Model Growth
• Loss Prediction
• FreeLM Model

Citation

If you find our work useful, please consider citing FLM-101B:

@article{flm-101b,
  author       = {Xiang Li and Yiqun Yao and Xin Jiang and Xuezhi Fang and Xuying Meng and
                  Siqi Fan and Peng Han and Jing Li and Li Du and Bowen Qin and Zheng Zhang and
                  Aixin Sun and Yequan Wang},
  title        = {FLM-101B: An Open LLM and How to Train It with \$100K Budget},
  year         = {2023}
}

You may also consider FreeLM's original work in your reference:

@article{freelm,
  author       = {Xiang Li and Xin Jiang and Xuying Meng and Aixin Sun and Yequan Wang},
  title        = {FreeLM: Fine-Tuning-Free Language Model},
  year         = {2023},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.01616}
}

Contact

tshwangyequan@gmail.com

License

This project is covered under the Apache 2.0 License.