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Installing Cornstarch

Cornstarch is a Python library that works with Pytorch (>=2.5) and ColossalAI (>=0.4.4).

Requirments

  • OS: Linux.
  • Python 3.10 and above.
  • Pytorch 2.5 and above.
  • Ampere or Hopper GPUs. Does not guarantee working on other generations of NVIDIA GPUs or AMD GPUs.

Note

It is highly recommended to use a Pytorch Docker container that provides pre-compiled CUDA, NCCL, Python, and Pytorch, and then install colossalai and Cornstarch in it. For systems powered by ARM CPUs (e.g. Altera or Grace), use an NVIDIA NGC Pytorch Docker container.

Follow NVIDIA Container toolkit guideline to use GPUs inside a Docker container.

Install Cornstarch from PyPI

Cornstarch relies on Colossal-AI for training a multimodal LLM, which has a strict version requirement on Pytorch and Huggingface transformers that are not compatible with Cornstarch dependencies.

For this reason, ColossalAI should first manually be installed and then should Cornstarch be installed:

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$ pip install --no-deps colossalai==0.4.6
$ pip install cornstarch

Note

You will see an error message from pip dependency resolver similar to the following:

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ERROR: pip's dependency resolver does not currently take into account all the packages that are installed. This behaviour is the source of the following dependency conflicts.
colossalai 0.4.6 requires torch<=2.4.1,>=2.2.0, but you have torch <your_version> which is incompatible.
colossalai 0.4.6 requires transformers==4.39.3, but you have transformers <your_version> which is incompatible.

But this is expected and there is no problem in installing and using cornstarch. You can also see that packages including cornstarch are successfully installed right after the error message: 

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Successfully installed ... cornstarch-0.0.5 ... tokenizers-0.21.0 transformers-4.49.0 ...

Install Cornstarch from Source

You can also install Cornstarch from source by cloning the Github repository. Manual colossalai installation introduced above should still be done.

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$ pip install --no-deps colossalai==0.4.6
$ git clone https://github.com/cornstarch-org/Cornstarch
$ cd Cornstarch
$ pip install -e .[dev]