Upgrade to Flower 1.28

Welcome to the migration guide for updating your Flower Configuration to the latest version, 1.28. This guide will walk you through the necessary steps to ensure a smooth transition, including any changes in configuration syntax, new features, and best practices for leveraging the latest capabilities of Flower. This guide is relevant for users upgrading from versions 1.26 and 1.27.

자세히 알아봅시다!

Summary of changes

With Flower 1.26, we introduced the Flower Configuration, a new system for managing SuperLink connections that replaces the older federations section in the pyproject.toml file. This change allows for more flexible and reusable connection configurations across all your Flower apps. You can read more about it in the Flower Configuration reference page.

Now with Flower 1.28, we have made further improvements to the Flower Configuration, closing the syntax gap between SuperLink connections used for Flower simulations and those used for running Flower with the Deployment Runtime. The result? A more unified and consistent experience when defining SuperLink connections, regardless of the runtime you are using. This means that the configuration of simulations (i.e. number of virtual SuperNodes, client resources, etc.) is now defined at the SuperLink that executes the simulation. Still, you can override these settings on a per-run basis if desired.

This guide will help you:

  • Understand how to migrate your existing connections for simulation in your Flower Configuration to the new syntax.

  • Learn how to view and adjust the simulation configuration in your SuperLink. You can do this either permanently or on a per-run basis.

Before we begin, ensure you have updated to Flower 1.28.

$ pip install -U "flwr[simulation]"
$ flwr --version # should show 1.28.x

Update your Flower Configuration

The main update in your Flower Configuration is to remove or comment simulation-specific settings (i.e. those starting with options.). These settings are now defined at the SuperLink level and will apply to all simulation runs using that SuperLink. Additionally, a new field address needs to be added. It will be used for launching a managed SuperLink on demand. Let’s see how to do this with an example. Use the following steps to update your Flower Configuration:

  1. Locate your Flower Configuration file. You can find it by running:

    $ flwr config list

    This will show you the path to your Flower Configuration file and the SuperLink connections defined in it. Example output:

Flower Config file: /path/to/your/.flwr/config.toml
SuperLink connections:
  local (default)
  supergrid

  1. Open the Flower Configuration file in a text editor. You should see something like this:

config.toml
[superlink]
default = "local"

[superlink.supergrid]
address = "supergrid.flower.ai"

[superlink.local]
options.num-supernodes = 10
options.backend.client-resources.num-cpus = 2
options.backend.client-resources.num-gpus = 0.0

  1. Remove or comment out the simulation-specific settings under the [superlink.local] section (and any other connections you may have added that also include options. fields). Then, add a new field containing address = ":local:". The updated configuration should look like this:

config.toml
[superlink]
default = "local"

[superlink.supergrid]
address = "supergrid.flower.ai"

[superlink.local]
address = ":local:"
# options.num-supernodes = 10 # or remove this line
# options.backend.client-resources.num-cpus = 2 # or remove this line
# options.backend.client-resources.num-gpus = 0.0 # or remove this line

Introducing the address field with the value :local: allows Flower to start a managed SuperLink on demand when you submit a run using this connection. Read more about this in the Run Flower Locally with a Managed SuperLink guide.

Using custom settings for simulations

참고

This guide assumes you don’t have a local SuperLink running. If you do, please stop it. If you aren’t sure, please refer to the section on stopping a local SuperLink.

In the section above we removed the simulation-specific settings from the Flower Configuration. Now, you may be wondering how to configure the number of virtual SuperNodes or client resources for your simulations. First, you can inspect whether your SuperLink connection is pointing to a managed local SuperLink ready for simulations by running:

$ flwr federation list

📄 Listing federations...
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━┓
┃  Federation   ┃                    Description                     ┃  Runtime   ┃ Status ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━┩
│ @none/default │ A federation for testing and development purposes. │ simulation │ active │
└───────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴────────────┴────────┘

Note the Runtime type is simulation. Then, you can view the current simulation configuration of your managed local SuperLink with the following command:

$ flwr federation list --federation="@none/default"

                        Simulation Configuration
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┓
┃            Setting             ┃            Key            ┃ Value ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━┩
│ Number of Simulated SuperNodes │ num-supernodes            │    10 │
├────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ ClientApp Resources (CPUs)     │ client-resources-num-cpus │     2 │
├────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ ClientApp Resources (GPUs)     │ client-resources-num-gpus │   0.0 │
├────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ Backend Name                   │ backend                   │   ray │
└────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┴───────┘

As you can see, the current configuration is the same as the one we had before in the Flower Configuration file config.toml. To change any of these settings, refer to the Customize the Simulation Runtime section in the Flower Simulation Runtime reference guide.