​
Overview

In the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Cluster, in order to improve dataloading speeds, we can avoid network dataset streaming via the create_worker_cache function. This enables caching of a dataset to local SSD, which has significantly faster read speeds versus network.

​
Procedure

To enable worker_cache for a new dataloader, we need to ensure that data directory is added to the worker_cache on the worker node. The utility function create_worker_cache allows users to cache the directory on the worker node. It looks at the src directory, and caches this directory on the worker_cache if it doesn’t exist and there is enough space on the cache (shouldn’t exceed 80% after the directory is cached). It returns the path to the directory on the worker_cache. Users just need to replace the returned directory with the original data_dir in the dataloader. Users just need to replace the returned directory with the original data_dir in the dataloader.
NoteThe create_worker_cache should be called only for the worker task.