Run_MaxText_via_xpk.md

How to run MaxText with XPK?

This document focuses on steps required to setup XPK on TPU VM and assumes you have gone through the README to understand XPK basics.

Steps to setup XPK on TPU VM

• Verify you have these permissions for your account or service account

  Storage Admin
  Kubernetes Engine Admin

• gcloud is installed on TPUVMs using the snap distribution package. Install kubectl using snap

sudo snap install kubectl --classic

• Install gke-gcloud-auth-plugin

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg] https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list

curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg add -

sudo apt update && sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk-gke-gcloud-auth-plugin

• Authenticate gcloud installation by running this command and following the prompt

gcloud auth login

• Run this command to configure docker to use docker-credential-gcloud for GCR registries:

gcloud auth configure-docker

• Test the installation by running

docker run hello-world

• If getting a permission error, try running

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

after which log out and log back in to the machine.

Build Docker Image for Maxtext

1. Git clone maxtext locally

   git clone https://github.com/google/maxtext.git
   cd maxtext

2. Build local Maxtext docker image

   This only needs to be rerun when you want to change your dependencies. This image may expire which would require you to rerun the below command

   # Default will pick stable versions of dependencies
   bash docker_build_dependency_image.sh

3. After building the dependency image maxtext_base_image, xpk can handle updates to the working directory when running xpk workload create and using --base-docker-image.

   See details on docker images in xpk here: https://github.com/google/xpk/blob/main/README.md#how-to-add-docker-images-to-a-xpk-workload

   Using xpk to upload image to your gcp project and run Maxtext

   gcloud config set project $PROJECT_ID
   gcloud config set compute/zone $ZONE
   
   # See instructions in README.me to create below buckets.
   BASE_OUTPUT_DIR=gs://output_bucket/
   DATASET_PATH=gs://dataset_bucket/
   
   # Install xpk
   pip install xpk
   
   # Make sure you are still in the maxtext github root directory when running this command
   xpk workload create \
   --cluster ${CLUSTER_NAME} \
   --base-docker-image maxtext_base_image \
   --workload ${USER}-first-job \
   --tpu-type=v5litepod-256 \
   --num-slices=1  \
   --command "python3 MaxText/train.py MaxText/configs/base.yml base_output_directory=${BASE_OUTPUT_DIR} dataset_path=${DATASET_PATH} steps=100 per_device_batch_size=1"

   Using xpk github repo

   git clone https://github.com/google/xpk.git
   
   # Make sure you are still in the maxtext github root directory when running this command
   python3 xpk/xpk.py workload create \
   --cluster ${CLUSTER_NAME} \
   --base-docker-image maxtext_base_image \
   --workload ${USER}-first-job \
   --tpu-type=v5litepod-256 \
   --num-slices=1  \
   --command "python3 MaxText/train.py MaxText/configs/base.yml base_output_directory=${BASE_OUTPUT_DIR} dataset_path=${DATASET_PATH} steps=100 per_device_batch_size=1"