Cerebras Cluster settings

Credentials path and management address

The params credentials_path and mgmt_address are configured by default in /opt/cerebras/config and do not need to be explicitly provided.

For example, /opt/cerebras/config could look as follows:

{
"clusters": [
        {
        "name": "system-name",
        "server": "1.2.3.4:9000",
        "authority": "cluster-server.system-name.example.com",
        "certificateAuthority": "/opt/cerebras/certs/tls.crt"
        }
],
"contexts": [
        {
        "cluster": "cluster-name",
        "name": "system-name"
        }
],
"currentContext": "system-name"
}

Python paths and mount directories

It is important to pass the paths that are needed by the dataloaders and external Python packages in addition to the path in which the Cerebras Model Zoo resides.

For example, let’s assume the following directory structure:

/path/to/datasets
        my_dataset/

/path/to/modelzoo
        modelzoo

/path/to/packages
        package_x
        package_y

Let’s further assume input workers need to access my_dataset directory to read the data and it needs python modules from packages modelzoo, package_x, and package_y. In order for the workers to access all these info, we need to specify the command as follows:

python run.py \
      CSX \
      --params params.yaml \
      --mode {train,eval,eval_all,train_and_eval} \
      --mount_dirs /path/to/datasets /path/to/modelzoo /path/to/packages \
      --python_paths /path/to/packages /path/to/modelzoo \

Note

If some paths share a common parent folder, only the parent folder needs to be specified for the given argument. For example, if modelzoo path is /cb/home/user/modelzoo, and data path is /cb/home/user/data, you only need to specify --mount_dirs /cb/home.

To simplify the command line arguments, you can define defaults for both mount_dirs and python_paths in a YAML file and export that file to an environment variable as follows:

export CEREBRAS_WAFER_SCALE_CLUSTER_DEFAULTS=/path/to/defaults/file.yaml

When this env variable is set in a Cerebras ModelZoo run, there is no need to pass --mount_dirs and --python_paths to the commandline unless you wish to add paths in addition to the defaults.