Add Ascend NPU as a backend

[hipudding]

Description & Motivation

Ascend is a full-stack AI computing infrastructure for industry applications and services based on Huawei Ascend processors and software. For more information about Ascend, see Ascend Community.

CANN (Compute Architecture of Neural Networks), developped by Huawei, is a heterogeneous computing architecture for AI.

Pytorch has officially announced support for Ascend NPU (through key PrivateUse1), please see the PrivateUse1 tutorial here.

Provide new backend support for pytorch-lighting, allowing users who use Ascend NPU to also use the convenient development and acceleration capabilities provided by pytorch-lighting.

Pitch

I'd like to add a new accelerator, and register it into Accelerators, which make it possible that customer can use this new backend by: "accelerator='npu'".

Alternatives

No response

Additional context

I have wrote a demo, please refer to: #19308

cc @Borda

[hipudding]

@lantiga Good day, Could you please give me some suggestions? Thanks.

[andre0rlandi]

@hipudding have you managed how to solve this issue?

[hipudding]

@hipudding have you managed how to solve this issue?

Not yet. I have create a Draft PR, which is a demo for this new backend. I need reply from community, This will guide my subsequent development tasks. However, I haven't gotten any response from the community yet, this issue is currently pending.

[whu-dft]

@hipudding

Hello,

I have recently utilized the draft code here for training with PyTorch Lightning on NPU. It has proven to be quite useful, and I would like to extend my gratitude for your contribution. I am hopeful that the pending pull request (PR) can be reviewed and merged into the official repository promptly.

Thank you once again for your valuable work.

Best regards

[Borda]

Thank you once again for your valuable work.

i think i could be made as extension repo

[hipudding]

i think i could be made as extension repo

@Borda Thanks for your reply. Could you please tell me how to do with this extension repo? Is there any guidance on extension development? Or just use monkey patch.

[XXXHUA]

i think i could be made as extension repo

@Borda Thanks for your reply. Could you please tell me how to do with this extension repo? Is there any guidance on extension development? Or just use monkey patch.

if I wanna use lightning in NPU Ascend now, could you give me some draft templates or suggestions ? Thanks！

[hipudding]

i think i could be made as extension repo

@Borda Thanks for your reply. Could you please tell me how to do with this extension repo? Is there any guidance on extension development? Or just use monkey patch.

if I wanna use lightning in NPU Ascend now, could you give me some draft templates or suggestions ? Thanks！

Yes, here's the demo.

[RobertLuo1]

Hi, @hipudding, Any update now? I have used your draft code for training. I found that although it runs pretty well with minimal changes, the speed is quite slow (910B vs V100). I wonder if the problem stems from torch_npu or the lightning framework.
Thank you in advance.