mpi : add support for distributed inference via MPI (#2099)

* MPI support, first cut

* fix warnings, update README

* fixes

* wrap includes

* PR comments

* Update CMakeLists.txt

* Add GH workflow, fix test

* Add info to README

* mpi : trying to move more MPI stuff into ggml-mpi (WIP) (#2099)

* mpi : add names for layer inputs + prep ggml_mpi_graph_compute()

* mpi : move all MPI logic into ggml-mpi

Not tested yet

* mpi : various fixes - communication now works but results are wrong

* mpi : fix output tensor after MPI compute (still not working)

* mpi : fix inference

* mpi : minor

* Add OpenMPI to GH action

* [mpi] continue-on-error: true

* mpi : fix after master merge

* [mpi] Link MPI C++ libraries to fix OpenMPI

* tests : fix new llama_backend API

* [mpi] use MPI_INT32_T

* mpi : factor out recv / send in functions and reuse

* mpi : extend API to allow usage with outer backends (e.g. Metal)

---------

Co-authored-by: Georgi Gerganov <ggerganov@gmail.com>

1 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index daa71c2..63457b6 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -268,6 +268,45 @@ Any value larger than 0 will offload the computation to the GPU. For example:
 ./main -m ./models/7B/ggml-model-q4_0.bin -n 128 -ngl 1
 ```
 
+### MPI Build
+
+MPI lets you distribute the computation over a cluster of machines. Because of the serial nature of LLM prediction, this won't yield any end-to-end speed-ups, but it will let you run larger models than would otherwise fit into RAM on a single machine.
+
+First you will need MPI libraries installed on your system. The two most popular (only?) options are [MPICH](https://www.mpich.org) and [OpenMPI](https://www.open-mpi.org). Either can be installed with a package manager (`apt`, Homebrew, MacPorts, etc).
+
+Next you will need to build the project with `LLAMA_MPI` set to true on all machines; if you're building with `make`, you will also need to specify an MPI-capable compiler (when building with CMake, this is configured automatically):
+
+- Using `make`:
+
+  ```bash
+  make CC=mpicc CXX=mpicxx LLAMA_MPI=1
+  ```
+
+- Using `CMake`:
+
+  ```bash
+  cmake -S . -B build -DLLAMA_MPI=ON
+  ```
+
+Once the programs are built, download/convert the weights on all of the machines in your cluster. The paths to the weights and programs should be identical on all machines.
+
+Next, ensure password-less SSH access to each machine from the primary host, and create a `hostfile` with a list of the hostnames and their relative "weights" (slots). If you want to use localhost for computation, use its local subnet IP address rather than the loopback address or "localhost".
+
+Here is an example hostfile:
+
+```
+192.168.0.1:2
+malvolio.local:1
+```
+
+The above will distribute the computation across 2 processes on the first host and 1 process on the second host. Each process will use roughly an equal amount of RAM. Try to keep these numbers small, as inter-process (intra-host) communication is expensive.
+
+Finally, you're ready to run a computation using `mpirun`:
+
+```bash
+mpirun -hostfile hostfile -n 3 ./main -m ./models/7B/ggml-model-q4_0.bin -n 128
+```
+
 ### BLAS Build
 
 Building the program with BLAS support may lead to some performance improvements in prompt processing using batch sizes higher than 32 (the default is 512). BLAS doesn't affect the normal generation performance. There are currently three different implementations of it: