Gahow Wang
e44e50ef78
- Corpus::load_cached: tokenize the (large) corpus ONCE, cache the id stream to
<corpus>.u16.bin (gpt2 vocab 50257 < 65536 → exact u16), read cache on reruns.
- Corpus::split_tail: hold out a tail slice as a validation corpus.
- train(): take an optional valid corpus + eval_every/eval_batches; periodic
deterministic val-loss eval that checkpoints the BEST val model; returns
TrainResult{train_losses, evals, best_val}. T6 fixed-cadence path preserved.
- bin/train + bin/export_safetensors: read architecture (--heads/--head-dim/
--layers/--ffn) + opt knobs (--steps/--batch/--seq/--max-lr/--val-tokens/
--eval-every) from CLI flags; defaults reproduce the v0-baseline tiny config.
- gitignore the multi-GB corpus + *.u16.bin caches + *.ckpt (dash5-only).
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).