--- name: nvidia-nemo/nemotron-3-ultra-text2sql-lora source: https://app.decimal.ai/s/nvidia-nemo-nemotron-3-ultra-text2sql-lora@1/SKILL.md source_sha256: 8e3c447dc531 --- # Nemotron-3 Ultra Text2SQL LoRA — runbook for a coding agent This skill helps you run the cookbook in this directory (`mbridge_lora_cookbook.ipynb`) on the user's behalf. The notebook is generic and ships with placeholders; your job is to gather the user's environment details, fill them in, launch the SLURM jobs, watch them, and report results. ## What the tutorial does Three steps, in order, each a SLURM job: 1. **Data prep** — builds a BIRD Text2SQL `training.jsonl` from both the no-reasoning and reasoning splits, formatted with Ultra's tokenizer/chat template. Short CPU job. 2. **Convert** — distributed import of the Hugging Face base checkpoint into Megatron-Bridge format. A multi-node GPU job (CPU import is not feasible for a 550B model). 3. **LoRA fine-tune** — packed-sequence LoRA training on the prepared data; saves a LoRA adapter. A multi-node GPU job. ## What you must understand before running - **Ultra is a 550B-total / A55B-active hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE.** It does **not** fit on one node, so every heavy step is a **multi-node SLURM job** submitted with `sbatch` and run in a container via Pyxis/enroot. Run everything from a cluster **login node** where `sbatch`/`squeue`/ `sacct` are available. - **Scale.** At the shipped parallel settings, both convert and train need **48 GPUs**. Node count is derived automatically as `48 / GPUS_PER_NODE` (e.g. 12 nodes at 4 GPUs/node). The user's QOS must permit a job of that size — an interactive or small-node-capped QOS will not work. - **Single config.** Everything is driven by one file, `config.env`, which the notebook's setup cell generates from the values you fill in. Every step and every `slurm/*.sbatch` script sources it. You can run the notebook cell, or write `config.env` directly with the same keys. - **One output root.** `WORKSPACE` is the single output root; everything generated lands under `$WORKSPACE/{base, dataprep, trained, cache/hf, logs}`. The base checkpoint (`HF_MODEL_PATH`) is the only separate, read-only path. - **The rhythm per step:** a **launch** cell submits the job, a re-runnable **check** cell shows status (`sacct`/`squeue`), and a **sanity** cell confirms the expected output exists before you move on. Follow this loop; don't skip the sanity check. ## Information to gather from the user Before launching anything, ask the user for the following and confirm the prerequisites. Don't guess these — a wrong value wastes a large multi-node allocation. Prefer asking all of them up front in one batch. **How to reach the cluster** - How do you connect to the login node where SLURM jobs are submitted (e.g. the ssh host)? - Is there a separate data-transfer host you prefer for large file moves? **SLURM settings** - SLURM **account** to charge. - **GPU partition** and a **QOS** that allows a multi-node job of `48 / GPUS_PER_NODE` nodes (not an interactive or small-node-capped QOS). Confirm the wall-clock limit is enough (convert is short; training is well under a couple of hours by default). - **CPU partition** and **QOS** for the short data-prep job. - **GPUs per node** on the target nodes (the tutorial targets GB200 at 4 GPUs/node; the node count derives from this). **Paths (all on a shared filesystem the compute nodes can mount)** - **`WORKSPACE`** — the output root to create/use. - **`HF_MODEL_PATH`** — where the **already-downloaded** Ultra base checkpoint lives (read-only input). The tutorial does **not** download the base model; confirm it is present. - The **shared-filesystem root** to bind-mount into the container (must contain both `WORKSPACE` and `HF_MODEL_PATH`). **Container & credentials** - The **container image** to use (path to a prepared image or a registry reference). The notebook ships a placeholder; this must be filled with a real Ultra-capable image. - A **Hugging Face token** so BIRD can be downloaded during data prep. The tutorial expects it at `${WORKSPACE}/cache/hf/token`; ask the user to place it there (or provide it so you can), and reference it by path — never print or echo a token. If the user has an environment-reference document for their cluster, ask for it first and pull these values from there instead of asking one by one. ## How to run it 1. From the login node, `cd` into this cookbook directory (it must be on the shared filesystem). 2. Fill the config: either edit the notebook's **Environment & SLURM Setup** cell and run it, or write `config.env` directly with the values gathered above. The setup cell has a guard that refuses to proceed while any placeholder (`<...>`) remains — make sure none are left. 3. Run the three steps in order. For each: submit via the launch cell/`sbatch`, **poll** the check cell until the job reaches `COMPLETED`, then run the sanity cell. 4. **Poll, don't block.** These are long-running multi-node jobs. Submit, then check back periodically with `sacct`/`squeue` — do not hold an interactive session open waiting, and do not stream logs live. ## Verifying success per step - **Data prep:** `$WORKSPACE/dataprep/training.jsonl` exists and has many rows; a sampled record shows the Nemotron-3 chat template. - **Convert:** `$WORKSPACE/base/latest_checkpointed_iteration.txt` plus an `iter_*` checkpoint dir exist. - **Train:** under `$WORKSPACE/trained//` there is a `latest_checkpointed_iteration.txt` and an `iter_*` adapter checkpoint; the training log shows the loss trending down and ends with a `LORA_TRAIN_DONE` marker. Report per-step status and elapsed time (from `sacct`) and the final training loss. ## Things already handled — do not change them - **Synchronous checkpoint saving** is set on purpose (`async_save=False`). Under some container runtimes the async-save path can hang; leave it as configured. - **Parallelism / resharding.** Convert uses one tensor-parallel layout and train uses another; only the tensor-parallel degree differs, so the converted checkpoint reshards cleanly on load. Don't retune these unless you change `GPUS_PER_NODE`, in which case keep the world size at 48 GPUs. - **Packed sequences** and the **LoRA target modules** (including the Mamba projections) come from the Ultra recipe — no need to configure them. - **Steps are idempotent:** data prep skips if `training.jsonl` exists; convert skips if the checkpoint already exists. Safe to re-run. ## Expected friction (so you don't misread it) - **The first training iteration is slow** — graph capture and MoE warmup can take on the order of ~15 minutes with no log output and the GPUs at 100%. This is normal; do not cancel the job. Later iterations are fast. - A multi-node GPU job that, in the rare case, sits at "loading distributed checkpoint" with zero progress for far longer than the warmup window can be cancelled and resubmitted; a fresh allocation usually clears it. - Benign noise in the convert log (framework stack-trace fragments, bare NCCL version lines) is not a crash — judge success by the job state and the sanity check, not by log chatter.