remote-gpu-trainer — Remote GPU Job Orchestration

Overview

Deploy and babysit long-running GPU jobs on rented boxes you don't own, across any platform, and get the result off the box before the meter or a preemption kills it. The core insight: you are a short-term tenant on someone else's machine — so the job is to detach the work, make the result outlive the instance, and stop the meter safely, not to provision a cluster.

This skill is platform-agnostic at the core, platform-specific at the edges: a fixed set of operating principles + a 6-phase lifecycle that hold everywhere, plus one profile per platform (profiles/<platform>.md) that owns every concrete path, proxy, billing verb, and spot semantic. Its defensible value is the union the big orchestrators skip: Chinese cgroup-isolated rentals + bare-SSH cheap boxes + the disk-budget / monitoring / teardown reality that is the job on metered hardware.

When to Use This Skill

Use whenever the user deploys, trains, monitors, or troubleshoots a long-running GPU job on a RENTED or remote instance they do not own — training, eval, ablation sweeps, batch inference, or large data processing — on AutoDL, RunPod, vast.ai, Lambda, Paperspace, Chinese platforms (恒源云/矩池云/Featurize/ 揽睿星舟), a bare SSH box, Slurm, or Kubernetes; single OR multi-instance. Triggers (multilingual): "远程 GPU 训练", "GPU 租赁", "GPU rental", "租卡", "spot 抢占", "spot preemption", "断点续训", "resumable training", "tmux 训练守护", "防 SSH 断线", "scp/rsync 上传", "多实例 ablation", "远程 GPU 监控", "省钱关机/销毁实例", "stop vs terminate billing", "checkpoint 磁盘满", "CUDA OOM/显存不足", "loss NaN/loss spike", "loss 不下降/不收敛", "overfit 单 batch", "FSDP/DeepSpeed 配置", "多卡训练 hang", "dataloader worker/数据增广 bug". NOT for purely local single-GPU training, in-instance multi-GPU DDP (use torchrun/accelerate), managed multi-cloud price-shopping (use SkyPilot's skill), or zero-ops serverless (use Modal).

When NOT to use — and what to use instead

Situation	Use instead
Local single-GPU, or multi-GPU DDP inside one box	torchrun / accelerate directly
Managed multi-cloud price-shopping + auto spot-recovery across Western clouds	SkyPilot (has its own Agent Skill) — then come back here to make your code resume-correct so its recovery actually works
Open BYOC dev environments	dstack
Zero-ops serverless inference	Modal
"Is this metric / ablation delta real?"	REQUIRED: verifying-dl-experiments (this skill owns running the job; that one owns whether the number is true)

This skill is for the blind spot those tools leave: AutoDL + Chinese platforms, bare SSH/Slurm/K8s rentals, and the operational gotchas (inode caps, mirror stalls, cgroup OOM, silent sync, spot grace windows, irreversible teardown) that survive whichever provisioner you use.

Operating principles (the WHY — 10 invariants)

These hold on every metered, isolated, rented GPU; only the paths/CLI change. One line each; the deep form with cross-platform nuance is in references/principles.md (read it before Phase 0).

1. Minimize paid wall-clock. The meter runs the whole time — smoke locally on CPU before renting, launch detached, release the instant verification passes.
2. Cheap checks before expensive compute. A 1–2 batch CPU smoke (logger off) kills import/config/shape/scale bugs for ~free. (Smoke content → verifying-dl-experiments.)
3. Trust artifacts you loaded, not log lines that claim success. "synced/saved/done" lies under a silently-failed write; a watcher's own state is also a claim — reconcile it against the real process/artifact.
4. Know what survives stop vs destroy. Per platform, identify exactly which mount survives a stop and which survives a terminate — the data you need often lives on the volatile one. (The single biggest portability trap.)
5. Storage fails on the dimension you're not watching. Disk dies on inodes before bytes; the real hog hides in a symlinked cache; clean by value (keep tiny evidence, drop big scratch); monitor df -i, not just df -h.
6. Never mutate inputs under a live run. A running job holds its scripts in memory by byte-offset; overwriting one mid-run re-executes blocks. Version filenames.
7. Design for retry — failure is probabilistic, transfers are flaky, mirrors are route-specific. Make wrappers idempotent + resumable; retry the identical config; wrap bulk transfers in timeout+resume loops; a mirror/proxy speeds ONE route — validate on the same route the real transfer uses.
8. Checkpoint-to-durable + idempotent resume is the universal spine. File checkpoint to the platform's durable location + unconditional load-latest-on-startup is the one mechanism that survives an SSH drop, a Slurm walltime kill, a K8s reschedule, a spot preemption, and a Colab disconnect. The detach primitive (tmux/sbatch/Job/commit) is the swappable plug; this is the invariant.
9. Cost and destructive actions are the user's call. Never auto-release/terminate, never delete durable files without confirmation; if cleanup can't free space, ask to expand the disk rather than silently shrink the experiment.
10. Teach the user the platform, don't just drive it. Most users don't know a platform's non-obvious conveniences (one-click SSH-key registration, GPU-availability notifications, built-in panels) or its danger clocks (auto-release/auto-delete timers on a stopped box — AutoDL releases a 关机 instance after 15 days → data disk gone; a stop that keeps billing; low-balance purge). Surface them on first contact — #9 stops the agent doing the dangerous thing, #10 warns the human before the clock fires. Per-platform list → each profile's Surface to the user block.

Monitoring physics (substrate for #3): foreground Bash hard-caps at 600 s; run_in_background has no cap and notifies on exit; a never-exiting watcher never notifies; an unquoted | in a poll regex reads stdin and hangs forever. The four-layer monitoring architecture is built on these facts → references/monitoring_patterns.md.

Code discipline (the wrapper & training scripts you write)

Two rules govern the launch/wrapper/training code this skill has you write — corollaries of #1 and #8, not new invariants:

1. Reuse before writing. Take the lowest rung that already works before adding code: the base image's pre-installed stack + platform features → a framework/library utility (torchrun / accelerate / HF) → your existing scripts/ templates → minimal new code. On a metered box a needless pip install also burns paid wall-clock and can break the image's ABI — Phase 1's rule (the prebuilt image is the env; don't conda create on a rental) is exactly this principle applied to dependencies.
2. Floor — minimum bounds scope, not correctness. Shrinking code must never drop what makes an expensive run survivable: checkpoint-to-durable + idempotent resume (#8), atomic writes, the error handling that prevents losing a long run, or seed/determinism logging. Keep one minimal self-check for non-trivial logic.

Pick your platform profile FIRST

Read the matching profile before Phase 0 — it owns every path, proxy, credential location, billing verb, and spot rule the phases below delegate to. Each follows the same 8-field schema (profiles/_schema.md).

New here? The path is: (1) find your platform in the table below → (2) read that profile's LAUNCH section (it walks rent → register SSH key → reach the box) → (3) come back and run the 6 phases from Phase 0. Already have a box you can ssh into? Skip straight to Phase 0.

You're on…	Profile	Kind	Detach primitive	Meter-stop verb
AutoDL (deepest, battle-tested)	profiles/autodl.md	ssh-rental	tmux	关机 (stops meter, keeps disk — the AutoDL exception)
RunPod	profiles/runpod.md	ssh-rental	tmux	terminate (stop still bills 2×; destroys volume disk)
vast.ai	profiles/vastai.md	ssh-rental (spot)	tmux	destroy (stop bills disk forever)
Lambda	profiles/lambda.md	cloud-api	tmux	terminate (no stop state)
Paperspace	profiles/paperspace.md	cloud-api	tmux	destroy + release IP + delete storage (shut-down stops compute only)
恒源云 / 矩池云 / Featurize / 揽睿星舟	profiles/china.md	ssh-rental	tmux	per-platform (data disk often bills while stopped)
Bare SSH box / Slurm / K8s / Colab-Kaggle	profiles/generic-ssh.md	ssh / slurm / k8s	tmux / sbatch / Job / commit	manual (a forgotten box bills 24/7)

Profile confidence: AutoDL is battle-tested from the author's daily use; the other six profiles are built from each platform's official docs + community reports (cited inline, verified <month>) and not yet independently live-tested — lean on the Phase-0 live measurements and re-verify any teardown/ billing fact against current docs before betting money or data (references/self-improvement.md §5).

Mental verb model (one API across all platforms; the profile binds each verb to real commands): up (rent+reach) → push (code/data on) → run (detached + checkpointing) → watch (durable monitor) → pull (results off + verify) → down (stop the meter).

Default workflow (6 phases)

Skip phases already done. Each phase delegates substrate to the profile and ends in a runnable check.

Phase 0 — Environment audit. Read the profile's STORAGE survival-matrix + region/DC-lock. Measure live: df -h && df -i <data-mount>, cgroup memory.max, nvidia-smi. Pre-compute the checkpoint disk budget (ckpt_size × N + scratch). → verify: nvidia-smi shows the expected GPU and df -i is not near 100%.

Phase 1 — SSH + credentials. Set the alias/env per the profile (the prebuilt image/base IS the env — do not conda create on a rental). Never rented before? the profile's LAUNCH section walks rent → register SSH key → connect. Push secrets via stdin, never onto a shared/durable FS (references/ssh_transport.md). → verify: ssh <alias> 'python -c "import torch;print(torch.cuda.is_available())"'.

Phase 2 — Wrapper + CPU-smoke gate. Build an idempotent run_one/run_queue from scripts/ (parameterized from the profile's OVERRIDES; size batch/workers to the box for a standalone run, but PIN them across cells for a fair comparison — references/training/throughput-profiling.md). Run the cheap CPU smoke locally BEFORE renting — it kills the dumb, expensive failures (e.g. python -m <your.train.module> --limit-batches 2 --epochs 1 — substitute your own entrypoint; this gate needs your training code plugged in). → verify: that smoke exits 0 on 2 batches with the logger disabled.

Phase 3 — Detached launch. Launch via the profile's detach primitive; probe briefly (log head + alive + no traceback), then hand back — never a blocking foreground sleep. → verify: within 60 s, the detach session is alive and the first log line shows the expected step/epoch.

Phase 4 — Durable monitoring. For anything over ~1–2 h, deploy the four-layer architecture (references/monitoring_patterns.md): on-box self-completion chain + session patrol loop + event sentinels + recovery handbook. On Claude Code, fire the L2 patrol via /loop 30m (or ScheduleWakeup) running scripts/health_patrol.sh.template; a host with no local recurring runner wires the on-box self-push instead (references/monitoring_patterns.md §7). A session-bound watcher alone dies with the session. Classify each outcome → fixed remediation; never blind-retry. → verify: the patrol reports even when nothing changed.

Phase 5 — Aggregate + verify + teardown. Checked-sync to durable storage (gate the success line on the copy result — principle #3), then load-and-verify each artifact (scripts/verify_local.py), THEN the profile's meter-stopping action. → verify: verify_local.py reports 100% OK before any teardown.

Iron Law — teardown gate: NO release / terminate / destroy / file-delete until checkpoints are pulled to local AND verified by load, and the user has explicitly approved the cost-affecting action. "It looked done in the log" is not evidence (principle #3). On most platforms the meter-stopping action is irreversible (deletes the disk) — confirmation matters more, not less.

Parallel ablation fan-out

For N ablation cells: one job per cell, an isolated write path per job (no shared mutable output), launched across instances/queues. REQUIRED: superpowers:dispatching-parallel-agents supplies the independence predicate (don't fan out onto shared state) and the mandatory post-fan-out reconciliation. FS-shared deployment pattern → references/parallel_ablation.md.

Quick reference — the four facts that bite per platform

Full detail in each profile; this table is the at-a-glance.

Platform	Survives stop	Survives destroy	Spot grace	China mirror needed
AutoDL	/root + data + FS	FS only	n/a	yes (/etc/network_turbo, hf-mirror)
RunPod	volume disk (bills 2×)	Network Volume only	~5 s SIGTERM→KILL	no (hf_transfer)
vast.ai	disk (bills forever)	nothing	~0 s (abrupt)	no
Lambda	n/a (no stop)	nothing	n/a (on-demand)	no
China (恒源云/矩池云/…)	varies; data disk bills	per-platform persistent vol	n/a	yes
generic-SSH/Slurm/K8s	you own it	you own it	Slurm SIGTERM→KillWait (def 30 s)	only if in China

Common gotchas (top 8 inline — full catalog in references/)

The universal ones that cost the most GPU-hours. Symptom → fix; root cause + the rest in references/gotchas_universal.md (run grep -i '<keyword>' references/gotchas_universal.md to jump).

1. SSH drops on pkill -9 (exit 255 + "Connection reset") — normal; re-ssh to verify, don't panic.
2. tmux holds the script in memory — editing it mid-run re-executes blocks; version the filename.
3. Disk-full crashes torch.save (iostream error) — pre-budget; auto-prune latest.pth, keep best.
4. cgroup OOM with no traceback (bare Killed / exit 137) — num_workers × big-tensor; size workers vs memory.max, not CPU count.
5. Silent sync failure — cp … 2>/dev/null; echo synced lies on a full/inode-exhausted FS; gate the success line on the actual copy result.
6. Spot preemption grace is tiny (~5 s → ~0 s on the platforms profiled here; AWS-style 2-min grace only on clouds not profiled) — a SIGTERM-flush handler is NOT a safety net; checkpoint on a timer to durable storage, load-latest unconditionally (references/spot-resilience.md).
7. "Stop" rarely stops the meter — only terminate/destroy does, and it's irreversible (deletes the disk). Know the verb from the profile before you click, and on RunPod a stopped Pod can even restart with zero GPUs.
8. CRLF breaks .sh on Linux — author on Windows → .gitattributes *.sh text eol=lf; on-box unblock sed -i 's/\r$//'.

When training itself breaks (the model, not the platform)

Platform ops is only half the job — once the box is running, training breaks in its own ways. The references/training/ layer is the debug knowledge for the run itself. Boundary: this layer owns "make it run, fast, and not crash"; verifying-dl-experiments owns "is the number real" — cross-link it for collapse / leakage / metric-validity. Every entry is symptom → root cause → fix with cited current docs.

• references/training/oom-memory.md — CUDA/VRAM + host-RAM OOM and the fit-it ladder (grad-accum → bf16 → activation-checkpointing → expandable_segments → FSDP/ZeRO → CPU/NVMe offload → LoRA/QLoRA); OOM-at-a-specific-step (first backward / val / longest batch); the memory snapshot + visualizer.
• references/training/distributed-launch.md — torchrun/accelerate/deepspeed launch + env contract, DDP/FSDP/ZeRO config, and the multi-GPU HANGS toolkit (one-rank-diverged, rank-conditional collective, dataloader-length mismatch). Multi-node wire → references/multinode.md.
• references/training/precision-stability.md — fp16/bf16/tf32 + AMP/GradScaler, NaN/Inf hunting (detect_anomaly), LLM loss spikes + divergence (warmup, clip, init, z-loss).
• references/training/throughput-profiling.md — GPU-bound vs data-bound vs comms-bound; dataloader knobs; torch.compile traps; flash-attention; torch.profiler / Nsight.
• references/training/checkpoint-resume.md — full-state save/resume mechanics, sharded (FSDP/DeepSpeed) checkpoints, and the resume bugs (epoch restart, data reshuffle, scaler/EMA dropped). Spot cadence → references/spot-resilience.md.
• references/training/by-domain.md — per-domain gotchas: LLM/transformer, vision (det/seg), diffusion, RL, multimodal/VLM.
• references/training/convergence-debugging.md — the "runs but won't learn / learns badly" layer: the overfit-one-batch smoke, params-not-updating, optimizer/LR/weight-decay/schedule config, loss-function footguns (double-softmax, BCEWithLogits, CE-target form), fine-tuning/freezing (frozen-BN drift, discriminative LR, LoRA wiring), and the training-dynamics dashboard (update:weight ratio, dead-ReLU, GradScaler-scale).
• references/training/data-pipeline.md — dataloader/dataset correctness (not speed): the worker-RNG augmentation-duplication bug, IterableDataset worker/rank sharding, collate/__len__/pin_memory/spawn contracts, and preprocessing/label/shuffle traps (RGB-vs-BGR, ToTensor ÷255, set_epoch).

Companion skills (separate installs; REQUIRED reading where present)

These are separate Agent Skills, not bundled here — install them for the full experience. On an agent where a companion isn't installed, treat its pointer below as an optional cross-reference; this skill still works standalone.

• verifying-dl-experiments — owns is-the-number-real: smoke content, retry-vs-safeguard, keepable-checkpoint, eval sizing, tracker forensics, GPU-0%-util diagnosis. This skill owns where/when/how-much-$.
• huggingface-skills:hf-cli — the transport verbs (hf download --resume, hf upload-large-folder, hf cache verify); this skill owns the China-mirror swap + stall-retry (references/china-network.md).
• huggingface-skills:huggingface-trackio — hosted tracker so metrics survive teardown (gotcha U20); poll trackio alerts as a structured monitor instead of brittle ssh-tail.
• superpowers:verification-before-completion — the Iron Law's general form; gates every "training done / synced / teardown complete" claim.
• superpowers:dispatching-parallel-agents — independence predicate + reconciliation for ablation fan-out.

Getting better over time (capture new gotchas + personalize)

This skill is static, but every run can teach it something — without corrupting it. Protocol → references/self-improvement.md. In short: when a run surfaces a gotcha the catalog lacks, only sediment a root-caused, reproduced, generalizable one (a one-off flake is a hypothesis, not a gotcha — principle #3); route it — user/project-specific → the host's memory system, generalizable → propose adding to references/gotchas_universal.md / the profile §7 / references/training/ (and offer an upstream PR); never silently rewrite a skill file — draft the symptom → root cause → fix and let the user approve. On first use, capture the user's platforms + paths + tracker entity into memory so later runs are pre-parameterized. Platform facts carry a verified <month> stamp — re-verify any teardown/billing fact against current docs before betting money or data.

Limitations

• Does not replace a real cloud orchestrator or managed provisioner; use it to make rented-box work survivable, not to optimize multi-cloud procurement.
• Platform billing, stop, destroy, and data-retention behavior can drift; re-check current provider docs before destructive or money-impacting actions.
• Requires user-owned credentials, SSH/API access, and explicit confirmation before teardown, deletion, or other irreversible cleanup.
• Companion skills named above are not bundled here; treat them as optional references unless installed in the current agent environment.

Bundled resources

Load only what the current phase needs.

• references/principles.md — the 10 invariants expanded, with the cross-platform nuance behind each.
• references/lifecycle_checklist.md — the 6-phase runbook as a per-platform checklist.
• references/gotchas_universal.md — universal + mixed gotchas (TOC + grep index at top).
• references/monitoring_patterns.md — the four-layer durable-monitoring architecture + robust ssh-poll template.
• references/ssh_transport.md — ssh config, rsync/scp resumable patterns, secrets-via-stdin, CRLF, two-SSH-flavor caveat.
• references/china-network.md — mirrors table + HF_ENDPOINT + resumable-download ladder + the no_proxy trap (all CN platforms).
• references/spot-resilience.md — preemption signals, Young/Daly checkpoint cadence, atomic-write resume.
• references/parallel_ablation.md — FS-shared fan-out + the independence predicate + reconciliation.
• references/multinode.md — (advanced) NCCL / fabric-manager / elastic-training gotchas; single-box users skip.
• references/training/ — the DL-training debug layer (8 files: oom-memory, distributed-launch, precision-stability, throughput-profiling, checkpoint-resume, by-domain, convergence-debugging, data-pipeline) — see "When training breaks" above.
• references/self-improvement.md — the feedback loop: capture a new gotcha (at a bar) into memory or the catalog, personalize on first run, keep platform facts fresh.
• scripts/ — wrapper templates (run_one/run_queue), monitors (mem_monitor, gpu_health, reap_vram_zombies), the read-only patrol (health_patrol.sh.template), transfer/aggregation (download_loop, aggregate_to_fs, setup-china-mirrors), the load-and-verify checker (verify_local.py), and the verified-stamp freshness linter (check_staleness.py).
• profiles/<platform>.md — the per-platform substrate (one per platform; _schema.md defines the 8 fields).
• examples/autodl_sweep/ — one complete, runnable worked case end to end.