Distributed Training of Local LLMs made easier with mDNS + ZeroConf for local hardware!

just integrated grove into smolcluster and it's genuinely one of the cleanest pieces of infra I've plugged in

• grove is a package built by some really sharp person, it handles zero-config node discovery and gives you a live terminal dashboard for distributed training.

I did faced the same problem, the problem of having to setup the SSH, networking, cables etc for every node I want to add to my cluster for training since I began to use smolcluster for my own projects , sigh...you know the pain right?

though the best I could is search and realize what I need is auto discovery of nodes, aka mDNS!

Its something that AirDrop uses for seamless auto discovery and data transfer between macOS devices, and Zeroconf for non-macOS ones, though sadly, couldn't come up with a working solution (skill issue it seems haha).

And thats where I found grove, I didn't build grove, I just integrated it.

• what it does:

on Mac, nodes discover each other over mDNS — no IPs, no SSH config, nothing! on Linux/Jetson it falls back to TCP + mDNS gives you a live per-rank TUI showing rank, host, loss, grad norm, tokens/sec, network I/O in real time

• the integration side:

every smolcluster training algorithm , i.e., FSDP, SyncPS, ClassicDP etc I have reimplemented using pure socket in Python for educational purposes, all of those you can now easily run without worrying about IPs, SSH, networking etc! directly within 2 commands! (before it was like 10 steps ufff - well it still is if you want some serious runs).

• usage on a 3-node cluster:

run grove start <script> -n 3 on the coordinator run grove join on each worker the cluster forms itself

that's the whole setup. no static IPs, no config files, no manual port forwarding.

been running this on my 3x Mac Minis and testing on Jetson boards soon.

check it out today at smolcluster[dot]com!

PS: shoutout to @swar_ja for releasing grove!