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Intel Gaudi

Users can take advantage of Intel Gaudi AI accelerators for significantly faster and cost-effective model training and inference. The Intel Gaudi AI accelerator family currently includes three product generations: Intel Gaudi 1, Intel Gaudi 2, and Intel Gaudi 3. Each server is equipped with 8 devices, known as Habana Processing Units (HPUs), providing 128GB of memory on Gaudi 3, 96GB on Gaudi 2, and 32GB on the first-gen Gaudi. For more details on the underlying hardware architecture, check out the Gaudi Architecture Overview.

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How it works out of the box

It is enabled by default if an Intel Gaudi device is detected. To disable it, pass `--cpu` flag to `accelerate launch` command or answer the corresponding question when answering the `accelerate config` questionnaire.

You can directly run the following script to test it out on Intel Gaudi:

    accelerate launch /examples/cv_example.py --data_dir images

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Limitations

The following features are not part of the Accelerate library and requires Optimum for Intel Gaudi:

- `fast_ddp` which implements DDP by applying an all-reduce on gradients instead of the Torch DDP wrapper.
- `minimize_memory` which is used for fp8 training and enables keeping fp8 weights in memory between the forward and backward passes, leading to a smaller memory footprint at the cost of additional fp8 casts.
- `context_parallel_size` which is used for Context/Sequence Parallelism (CP/SP) and partitions the network inputs and activations along sequence dimension to reduce memory footprint and increase throughput.

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