> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.primeintellect.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Scaling

This page covers how to scale `prime-rl` from a single GPU to a 1000-GPU cluster: single-node and multi-node deployments, FSDP / expert parallelism / context parallelism, and throughput benchmarking. See [Training](/prime-rl/training) for detailed documentation of the trainer configuration and [Inference](/prime-rl/inference) for the inference configuration.

## Table of Contents

* [Single-Node vs. Multi-Node Deployment](#single-node-vs-multi-node-deployment)
  * [Single-Node](#single-node)
    * [RL Placement](#rl-placement)
    * [SFT and Torchrun](#sft-and-torchrun)
  * [Multi-Node](#multi-node)
* [Parallelism Knobs](#parallelism-knobs)
  * [FSDP](#fsdp)
  * [Expert Parallelism](#expert-parallelism)
  * [Context Parallelism](#context-parallelism)
  * [Activation Checkpointing and Offloading](#activation-checkpointing-and-offloading)
  * [Optimizer Offloading](#optimizer-offloading)
  * [LM Head Chunking](#lm-head-chunking)
* [Memory-Tight Recipe](#memory-tight-recipe)
* [SLURM](#slurm)
  * [Activation](#activation)
  * [`[deployment]` Block](#deployment-block)
  * [Examples](#examples)
  * [Custom Templates](#custom-templates)
* [Benchmarking](#benchmarking)

## Single-Node vs. Multi-Node Deployment

The `rl`, `sft`, and `inference` entrypoints all accept a `[deployment]` block (`type = "single_node"` or `"multi_node"`) that picks how the trainer / orchestrator / inference processes are placed across hardware. **Single-node** runs locally; **multi-node** currently goes through [SLURM](#slurm) — the launcher writes an sbatch script that places inference replicas, the orchestrator, and the trainer with the right rendezvous endpoints, IPs, ports, and shared-filesystem paths wired in.

### Single-Node

#### RL Placement

`rl` defaults to 1 trainer GPU and 1 inference GPU. To give inference 6 GPUs with data parallelism and the trainer the remaining 2 on an 8-GPU node:

```bash theme={null}
uv run rl @ rl.toml \
  --deployment.num-infer-gpus 6 \
  --deployment.num-train-gpus 2 \
  --inference.parallel.dp 6
```

The launcher allocates GPUs in order from `CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES` (or all visible GPUs): inference first, trainer next, teacher last. To target a specific physical subset, pin `CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES` before launching.

For quick A/B ablations on the same node, run two RL instances side-by-side in separate tmux sessions, each pinned to half the GPUs and a separate inference port:

```bash theme={null}
# session 1, GPUs 0–1, default port 8000
bash scripts/tmux.sh -s exp1 -o outputs/exp1
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 uv run rl @ rl.toml --output-dir outputs/exp1

# session 2, GPUs 2–3, port 8001
bash scripts/tmux.sh -s exp2 -o outputs/exp2
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=2,3 uv run rl @ rl.toml \
  --inference.server.port 8001 \
  --orchestrator.client.base-url http://localhost:8001/v1 \
  --output-dir outputs/exp2
```

#### SFT and Torchrun

`uv run sft` handles distributed launch internally. To scale from 1 to N GPUs, set the deployment GPU count (or just let it pick up `WORLD_SIZE`). For non-default layouts, the manual equivalent is:

```bash theme={null}
uv run torchrun \
  --nproc-per-node 8 \
  --local-ranks-filter 0 \
  src/prime_rl/trainer/sft/train.py @ sft.toml
```

`--local-ranks-filter 0` keeps console output to rank 0 only; per-rank stdout/stderr is still captured in `<output_dir>/logs/trainer/torchrun/`.

### Multi-Node

Multi-node deployments (RL or SFT) are launched via [SLURM](#slurm) — set `[deployment] type = "multi_node"` plus the matching `[slurm]` block, and the launcher writes the sbatch script that places inference, orchestrator, and trainer across the requested nodes with the inter-process wiring set up correctly. See [SLURM § Examples](#examples) for full configs.

## Parallelism Knobs

### FSDP

FSDP2 is the default model sharding strategy. By default the trainer fully shards parameters, gradients, and optimizer state across the data-parallel mesh. Tweakable knobs:

| Knob                                  | Effect                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
| ------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `trainer.model.dp_replicate`          | Number of dimensions to **replicate** instead of shard. Set to 2 to run 2-way DP replication × FSDP sharding within each replica — useful for very large clusters where pure FSDP communication dominates. |
| `trainer.model.reshard_after_forward` | If `true` (default), parameters are resharded after the forward pass to free memory; the backward pass re-gathers. Set `false` to keep params resident — faster but more memory.                           |
| `trainer.model.fsdp_cpu_offload`      | Offload params + grads + optimizer state to CPU. Big memory win, large throughput hit.                                                                                                                     |
| `trainer.model.optim_cpu_offload`     | Offload only optimizer state. Mid-ground — small throughput cost, decent memory savings, especially at low GPU count.                                                                                      |

### Expert Parallelism

EP shards MoE expert weights across the EP mesh, dramatically reducing the FSDP communication volume per layer and improving the training throughput. EP is only available with the custom model implementation (`model.impl = "custom"` or `"auto"` for supported families).

```toml theme={null}
[trainer.model]
impl = "custom"
ep = 8                     # EP degree; must divide num_experts
ep_comm_backend = "torch"  # or "deepep"
```

`ep_comm_backend = "deepep"` uses DeepEP's custom dispatch/combine kernels for speed, with two extra knobs (`deepep_num_sms`, `deepep_token_chunk_size`) — tune on your hardware.

### Context Parallelism

CP shards a single sequence across multiple GPUs along the token dimension — for long-context sequences. We reccomend using `ulysses` style CP for most of the models to get the most throughput. Some models (e.g. GLM-5) only support `ring` style CP. Wrong setting will be rejected on validation.

```toml theme={null}
[trainer.model]
impl = "custom"
attn = "flash_attention_2"   # or fa3 / fa4
cp = 2                       # CP degree
cp_style = "ulysses"         # "ring"
```

### Activation Checkpointing and Offloading

| Knob                                  | Memory ↓ | Throughput ↓ |
| ------------------------------------- | -------- | ------------ |
| `trainer.model.ac`                    | large    | \~25%        |
| `trainer.model.ac.mode = "selective"` | medium   | small        |
| `trainer.model.ac_offloading`         | extra    | a bit more   |

Enable selective AC (custom impl only) for the best memory/throughput tradeoff:

```toml theme={null}
[trainer.model.ac]
mode = "selective"
targets = ["norm", "attn_proj"]  # see Reference for the full list per architecture
```

We reccomend also using `ac_offloading` and `ac_offloading.max_inflight_activations = 5` to further reduce the memory footprint in tradeoff for some throughput. We've observed this feature to be very effective, lowering the peak memory usage by 30-40% in some cases, while only lossing \~3-5% of throughput:

```toml theme={null}
[trainer.model.ac_offloading]
max_inflight_activations = 5
```

### Optimizer Offloading

Offloading optimizer states to CPU is a near-free memory win at low GPU counts:

```toml theme={null}
[trainer.optim]
# any optimizer type
type = "adamw"

[trainer.model]
optim_cpu_offload = true
```

Mutually exclusive with `fsdp_cpu_offload`. Also incompatible with `trainer.max_concurrent_runs > 1` (multi-tenant training). Muon doesn't support `fsdp_cpu_offload` but does support `optim_cpu_offload`.

### LM Head Chunking

The vanilla LM head materializes a `[batch * seq, vocab]` logits tensor on every step — a major memory tax when the vocabulary is large (often >100K). `fused_lm_head_token_chunk_size` swaps in a custom fused linear + logprob/entropy kernel that streams through `chunk_size` tokens at a time, avoiding the materialization:

```toml theme={null}
[trainer.model]
fused_lm_head_token_chunk_size = "auto"     # picks 8192 for RL
# or explicit:
# fused_lm_head_token_chunk_size = 1024     # smaller = lower memory, more launches
# fused_lm_head_token_chunk_size = "disabled"  # default; vanilla LM head
```

`auto` is a safe starting point for RL. Drop the chunk size further when peak memory is still tight (e.g. with very long sequences); raise it to amortize kernel-launch overhead. Only available with `model.impl = "custom"`, and currently RL-only — the SFT trainer rejects integer values.

## Memory-Tight Recipe

The kitchen-sink config for fitting large MoE on limited GPUs at acceptable throughput:

```toml theme={null}
[trainer.model]
impl = "custom"
fused_lm_head_token_chunk_size = 1024
ep = 8
cp = 2
optim_cpu_offload = true

[trainer.model.compile]

[trainer.model.ac]
freq = 1

[trainer.model.ac_offloading]
max_inflight_activations = 1
```

Walks through every memory lever in order: FSDP+EP shard the weights, CP shards the activations along the token dim, AC + AC offloading shrink the activation footprint, fused LM head chunks the loss, `torch.compile` reduces fragmentation, optim offload moves Adam state off GPU. Apply selectively — each knob has a throughput cost.

## SLURM

The `rl`, `sft`, and `inference` entrypoints all submit to SLURM when a `[slurm]` table is present — there's no separate entrypoint.

### Activation

A SLURM config is usually a thin overlay that adds `[slurm]` (and `[deployment]` for multi-node) on top of a base config. Configs are composed left-to-right via the `@` CLI syntax — see [Configuration § TOML Composition](/prime-rl/configuration#toml-composition):

```toml theme={null}
# my_slurm.toml
output_dir = "/shared/outputs/my-rl"

[slurm]
job_name = "my-rl-run"
```

Launch:

```bash theme={null}
uv run rl @ base_rl.toml @ my_slurm.toml             # submits via sbatch
uv run rl @ base_rl.toml @ my_slurm.toml --dry-run   # writes the sbatch script + resolved config, exits
```

### `[deployment]` Block

`[deployment]` is a discriminated union picked by `type` — `single_node` or `multi_node` for RL/SFT, with an extra disaggregated variant for inference. RL multi-node:

```toml theme={null}
[deployment]
type = "multi_node"
num_train_nodes = 2
num_infer_nodes = 1
gpus_per_node = 8                # default
nodes_per_fsdp_group = 1         # optional — controls FSDP island size
```

SFT multi-node:

```toml theme={null}
[deployment]
type = "multi_node"
num_nodes = 2
gpus_per_node = 8
```

### Examples

Full multi-node configs ship in [`examples/multinode/`](https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-rl/tree/main/examples/multinode):

* [`rl.toml`](https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-rl/blob/main/examples/multinode/rl.toml) — two-node RL run with NCCL weight broadcast on a 30B MoE student.
* [`sft.toml`](https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-rl/blob/main/examples/multinode/sft.toml) — two-node SFT against the same model.

For inference-only multi-node, set `[deployment] type = "multi_node"` on an inference TOML — each node runs an independent vLLM replica (TP and DP must fit within one node), and the launcher prints one URL per node. Front the URLs with a router or point clients at any of them.

### Custom Templates

For unusual partitions, module loads, or environment setup, supply your own Jinja2 template:

```bash theme={null}
uv run rl @ my_config.toml --slurm.template-path path/to/my_template.sbatch.j2
```

The default templates live under [`src/prime_rl/templates/`](https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-rl/tree/main/src/prime_rl/templates) — copy one as a starting point.

## Benchmarking

Every entrypoint supports a `--bench` flag that runs a few warm-up + measurement steps with fake data and prints a rich-formatted throughput / MFU table:

```bash theme={null}
# SFT trainer alone
uv run sft @ sft.toml --bench
uv run sft ... --data.type fake --data.length variable --bench   # variable-length fake data

# RL trainer alone (no inference involved)
uv run trainer @ train.toml --data.fake --bench

# Inference alone — start the server normally, then bench the orchestrator
uv run inference @ infer.toml
uv run orchestrator @ orch.toml --bench

# Full RL stack (trainer with fake data, inference with real data from orchestrator)
uv run rl @ rl.toml --bench
```

Persist results with `--bench.output-json`. Use this to compare parallelism configs before committing a multi-day run.