Horovod in Docker

To streamline the installation process, we have published reference Dockerfiles so you can get started with Horovod in minutes. These containers include Horovod examples in the /examples directory.

Pre-built Docker containers with Horovod are available on DockerHub for GPU, CPU, and Ray.

Running on a single machine

After the container is built, run it using nvidia-docker.

Note: You can replace horovod/horovod:latest with the specific pre-build Docker container with Horovod instead of building it by yourself.

$ nvidia-docker run -it horovod/horovod:latest
root@c278c88dd552:/examples# horovodrun -np 4 -H localhost:4 python keras_mnist_advanced.py

If you don’t run your container in privileged mode, you may see the following message:

[a8c9914754d2:00040] Read -1, expected 131072, errno = 1

You can ignore this message.

Running on multiple machines

Here we describe a simple example involving a shared filesystem /mnt/share using a common port number 12345 for the SSH daemon that will be run on all the containers. /mnt/share/ssh would contain a typical id_rsa and authorized_keys pair that allows passwordless authentication.

Note: These are not hard requirements but they make the example more concise. A shared filesystem can be replaced by rsyncing SSH configuration and code across machines, and a common SSH port can be replaced by machine-specific ports defined in /root/.ssh/ssh_config file.

Primary worker:

host1$ nvidia-docker run -it --network=host -v /mnt/share/ssh:/root/.ssh horovod/horovod:latest
root@c278c88dd552:/examples# horovodrun -np 16 -H host1:4,host2:4,host3:4,host4:4 -p 12345 python keras_mnist_advanced.py

Secondary workers:

host2$ nvidia-docker run -it --network=host -v /mnt/share/ssh:/root/.ssh horovod/horovod:latest \
    bash -c "/usr/sbin/sshd -p 12345; sleep infinity"
host3$ nvidia-docker run -it --network=host -v /mnt/share/ssh:/root/.ssh horovod/horovod:latest \
    bash -c "/usr/sbin/sshd -p 12345; sleep infinity"
host4$ nvidia-docker run -it --network=host -v /mnt/share/ssh:/root/.ssh horovod/horovod:latest \
    bash -c "/usr/sbin/sshd -p 12345; sleep infinity"

Adding Mellanox RDMA support

If you have Mellanox NICs, we recommend that you mount your Mellanox devices (/dev/infiniband) in the container and enable the IPC_LOCK capability for memory registration:

$ nvidia-docker run -it --network=host -v /mnt/share/ssh:/root/.ssh --cap-add=IPC_LOCK --device=/dev/infiniband horovod/horovod:latest
root@c278c88dd552:/examples# ...

You need to specify these additional configuration options on primary and secondary workers.

Running containers with different ports

To run in situations without a common SSH port (e.g., multiple containers on the same host):

  1. Configure your ~/.ssh/config file to assign custom host names and ports for each container

    Host host1
      HostName 192.168.1.10
      Port 1234
    
    Host host2
      HostName 192.168.1.10
      Port 2345
    
  2. Use horovodrun directly as though each container were a separate host with its own IP

    $ horovodrun -np 8 -H host1:4,host2:4 python keras_mnist_advanced.py