Gahow Wang
e3912c2380
New crate xtrain-model: a from-scratch decoder built entirely from the
autodiff op set.
- Config (tiny: dim=32, 2 layers, 2 heads, head_dim=16, ffn=64).
- TinyTransformer: embedding -> N x {pre-RMSNorm -> multi-head causal
attention (RoPE, additive causal mask, per-head SDPA) -> residual;
pre-RMSNorm -> SwiGLU MLP -> residual} -> final RMSNorm -> LM head.
x@W weight convention (engine GEMM is plain A@B); dim=n_heads*head_dim.
- params()/zero_grad-able leaves for the optimizer; param_to_host export.
- overfit test: char-level bring-up (embedded text -> vocab -> shifted
targets), minimal hand-written GD (p -= lr*grad) memorises one fixed
batch -> loss ~0 + greedy argmax matches targets. End-to-end fwd+bwd
correctness signal. Gated #![cfg(not(no_cuda))].
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
xtrain
A from-scratch Rust + CUDA LLM training engine — the sibling of xserv (the inference side). GPU-first.
The goal is to learn the full training-systems stack by hand: autograd / backward passes / optimizers (AdamW) / the training loop / distributed logic. Heavy lifting is borrowed where it makes sense (GEMM → cuBLAS after a hand-written version, multi-GPU comms → NCCL, tokenizer → reused from xserv), but the core is written from scratch. The target architecture is a tiny modern transformer (RoPE + RMSNorm + SwiGLU, ~1–30M params) whose forward aligns with xserv's Qwen3, so the backward passes map one-to-one onto xserv's existing forward kernels and trained weights can flow back into xserv.
Status
Bootstrapping (P0). This repo currently contains only the project skeleton and a working Rust↔CUDA build chain, verified by a trivial vector-add CUDA kernel.
Layout
xtrain/
├── Cargo.toml # workspace
├── csrc/ # CUDA sources (.cu)
│ └── test/vecadd.cu # trivial element-wise vector-add (smoke test)
└── crates/
└── xtrain-cuda/ # CUDA Runtime FFI + build.rs (nvcc → sm_120)
├── build.rs # compiles csrc/*.cu via the `cc` crate, links cudart
├── src/ # ffi / error / device / memory
└── tests/ # vecadd smoke test
The build mirrors xserv's approach: build.rs invokes nvcc (via the cc crate)
to compile csrc/*.cu targeting sm_120 (RTX 5090) and links them into the Rust
crate over hand-written extern "C" FFI.
Building & testing
CUDA compilation and execution happen on a GPU box (dash5, 8× RTX 5090, sm_120):
export PATH=/usr/local/cuda/bin:$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH
cargo build
cargo test -p xtrain-cuda -- --nocapture # runs the vecadd smoke test
On a machine without nvcc/GPU, build.rs detects the missing toolchain, skips
CUDA compilation, and sets a no_cuda cfg — so host-side cargo check still
works (the GPU smoke test is compiled out).