Quickstart

Running Plato using a configuration file

To start a federated learning training workload, run ./run from the repository’s root directory. For example:

./run -c configs/MNIST/fedavg_lenet5.yml

  • -c: the path to the configuration file to be used. The default is config.yml in the project’s home directory.

  • -b: the base path, to be used to contain all models, datasets, checkpoints, and results.

  • -r: resume a previously interrupted training session (only works correctly in synchronous training sessions).

  • -d: download the dataset to prepare for a training session.

  • --cpu: use the CPU as the device only.

Plato uses the YAML format for its configuration files to manage the runtime configuration parameters. Example configuration files have been provided in the configs directory.

Running examples built with Plato

In examples/, a number of research projects that were developed using Plato as the federated learning framework have been included. To run them, just run the main Python program in each of the directories with a suitable configuration file. For example, to run the FedRep project which implements the FedRep algorithm, run the command:

python examples/FedRep/fedrep.py -c examples/FedRep/fedrep_MNIST_lenet5.yml

Running Plato with MindSpore or TensorFlow

Plato is designed to support multiple deep learning frameworks, including PyTorch, TensorFlow, and MindSpore.

TensorFlow. Install the tensorflow and tensorflow-datasets pip packages first:

pip install tensorflow tensorflow-datasets
./run -c configs/MNIST/fedavg_lenet5_tensorflow.yml

On macOS with M1 or M2 CPUs, install the tensorflow-macos package, rather than tensorflow:

pip install tensorflow-macos tensorflow-datasets

MindSpore. Plato currently supports the latest MindSpore release, 2.0.0. Follow the installation instructions in the official MindSpore website to install MindSpore in your conda environment. For example, on an M1 Mac, use the command:

conda install mindspore=2.0.0 -c mindspore -c conda-forge

To use trainers and servers based on MindSpore, assign true to use_mindspore in the trainer section of the configuration file. If GPU is not available when MindSpore is used, assign true to cpuonly in the trainer section as well. These variables are unassigned by default, and Plato would use PyTorch as its default framework. As examples of using MindSpore as its underlying deep learning framework, two configuration files have been provided: configs/MNIST/fedavg_lenet5_mindspore.yml and configs/MNIST/mistnet_lenet5_mindspore.yml. For example:

./run -c configs/MNIST/fedavg_lenet5_mindspore.yml

Running Plato in a Docker container

Most of the codebase in Plato is designed to be framework-agnostic, so that it is relatively straightfoward to use Plato with a variety of deep learning frameworks beyond PyTorch, which is the default framwork it is using. One example of such deep learning frameworks that Plato currently supports is MindSpore 2.0.0.

To build such a Docker image, use the provided Dockerfile for PyTorch and Dockerfile_MindSpore for MindSpore:

docker build -t plato -f Dockerfile .

or:

docker build -t plato -f Dockerfile_MindSpore .

Note: Both Dockerfiles assume the use of macOS and Apple M1/M2 CPUs as the host platform. If you use Intel CPUs, replace:

wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-aarch64.sh -O ~/miniconda3/miniconda.sh

with

wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86.sh -O ~/miniconda3/miniconda.sh

To run the docker image that was just built, use the command:

./dockerrun.sh

Or if GPUs are available, use the command:

./dockerrun_gpu.sh

To remove all the containers after they are run, use the command:

docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

To remove the plato Docker image, use the command:

docker rmi plato

On Ubuntu Linux, you may need to add sudo before these docker commands.

The provided Dockerfile helps to build a Docker image running Ubuntu 20.04, with a virtual environment called plato pre-configured to support PyTorch 2.0.1 and Python 3.9.17.

If MindSpore support is needed, the provided Dockerfile_MindSpore contains two pre-configured environments for CPU and GPU environments, respectively, called plato_cpu or plato_gpu. They support MindSpore 2.0.0 and Python 3.9.17 (which is the Python version that MindSpore 2.0.0 requires). Both Dockerfiles have GPU support enabled. Once an image is built and a Docker container is running, one can use Visual Studio Code to connect to it and start development within the container.