Checkpointing and Recovery
Checkpointing and recovery refer to the process of saving the state of a system, application, or model at specific intervals (checkpointing) and restoring it from a saved state in case of failure (recovery). In machine learning, checkpointing involves periodically saving model parameters, optimizer states, and training progress so that training can resume from the last checkpoint instead of starting over. This is especially useful for long-running tasks, where interruptions due to system crashes, power failures, or preempted cloud instances can otherwise result in significant losses.
Checkpointing and recovery are crucial for ensuring fault tolerance, efficiency, and reproducibility in training large-scale models. Without checkpointing, an unexpected failure could waste hours or even days of computation. Additionally, it allows for experiment reproducibility, enabling researchers to revisit and fine-tune models from intermediate states, rather than redoing...