quiz.json

{
  "lesson": "77-data-parallel-ddp",
  "title": "Data Parallel DDP From Scratch",
  "questions": [
    {
      "stage": "pre",
      "question": "Why does DDP broadcast parameters at construction instead of relying on the same seed across ranks?",
      "options": [
        "Broadcast is faster than seeding",
        "Same-seed init drifts by float epsilon across ranks; broadcast guarantees byte-equal weights before training starts",
        "PyTorch forbids same-seed init",
        "Broadcast saves memory"
      ],
      "correct": 1,
      "explanation": "Float ops on different hardware (or even different process orders) can differ at the bit level. A broadcast from rank 0 is the only way to get byte-equal weights everywhere."
    },
    {
      "stage": "pre",
      "question": "What does DDP do after backward and before optimizer.step?",
      "options": [
        "Nothing",
        "Saves a checkpoint",
        "Allreduce-SUM every parameter's gradient and divide by world_size to get the mean gradient",
        "Broadcasts logits"
      ],
      "correct": 2,
      "explanation": "The mean gradient is invariant to world_size so a learning rate tuned at one rank works at N ranks."
    },
    {
      "stage": "check",
      "question": "Why divide by world_size after allreduce-SUM instead of using allreduce-MEAN?",
      "options": [
        "Allreduce-MEAN does not exist in gloo",
        "Division by world_size on each rank is a local op; allreduce-MEAN would be implemented the same way under the hood",
        "Division produces NaN",
        "world_size is unknown"
      ],
      "correct": 1,
      "explanation": "Both approaches yield the same arithmetic. NCCL ships allreduce-AVG since 2.10; gloo does not, so divide locally after SUM."
    },
    {
      "stage": "check",
      "question": "What does gradient bucketing in production DDP achieve?",
      "options": [
        "Quantises gradients to int8",
        "Coalesces many small allreduces into one large allreduce, amortising the per-call latency floor",
        "Frees gradient memory",
        "Skips backward"
      ],
      "correct": 1,
      "explanation": "A 1B-parameter model has thousands of grad tensors; one allreduce per tensor pays gloo or NCCL latency thousands of times."
    },
    {
      "stage": "check",
      "question": "Why does no_sync() exist in PyTorch DDP?",
      "options": [
        "To turn off DDP",
        "Gradient accumulation over K microbatches needs to skip the post-backward allreduce for K-1 of them; no_sync wraps that pause",
        "To switch backends",
        "To debug"
      ],
      "correct": 1,
      "explanation": "Without no_sync the allreduce fires K times per accumulated step and throughput drops to the floor."
    },
    {
      "stage": "post",
      "question": "Why does this lesson's reference implementation walk every rank's micro-batch sequentially in one process?",
      "options": [
        "Single-process is faster",
        "It gives a byte-equal baseline: the sequential mean gradient must equal DDP's allreduced mean gradient at every step",
        "It is the only way to use gloo",
        "It saves memory"
      ],
      "correct": 1,
      "explanation": "Equivalence to the reference loop is the load-bearing correctness test; without it gradient sync bugs hide until step 10000."
    }
  ]
}