PNNL

Reproducibility in distributed AI training is a crucial challenge due to several sources of uncertainty, including stragglers, data variability, and inherent randomness. Stragglers—slower processing nodes in a distributed system—can introduce timing discrepancies that affect the synchronization of model updates, leading to inconsistent states across training runs.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks, which merge the capabilities of retrieval systems and generative models, significantly enhance the relevance and accuracy of responses produced by large language models (LLMs). These frameworks retrieve relevant documents from a large corpus and use these documents to inform the generative process, thereby improving the contextuality and precision of the generated content.

Parallel I/O is a critical component in high-performance computing (HPC), allowing multiple processes to read and write data concurrently from a shared storage system. HDF5—a widely adopted data model and library for managing complex scientific data—supports parallel I/O but introduces challenges in I/O reproducibility, where repeated executions do not always produce identical results.