I am curious, how were you able to feed the GPUs? Did you simply preload the entire dataset into RAM (it certainly seems possible)? Did you preapply BPE? Did you train your own BPE?
Note that the encoded dataset (through the GPT-2 BPE tokenizer) will be much, much less than 17GB, both on disk and in memory (in my experience it can be anywhere from 1/3rd to 1/2 the size)
If finetuning an existing GPT-2 model, you must use that BPE tokenizer; you could theoretically use your own but that wouldn't make a difference performance-wise and you'd just have a lot of wasted tokenspace.
The efficiencies of using your own tokenizer for bespoke, esoteric content that does not match typical internet speak (like this) are why I recommend training your own tokenizer and GPT-2 from scratch if possible.
Yeah, I trained my own BPE tokenizer for this and it results in pretty good compression. From 1024 BPE tokens you can generate anywhere from 2000-6000 actual characters of text. My guess is that it's a bit more efficient than English-BPE because there's a lot of repetitive stuff in source code (think spaces for indentation, or "if("/"while("/"for (int").
Yep, I trained my own BPE using HuggingFace's tokenizer library. During training I didn't keep the entire dataset in memory because even on an RTX8000 the full dataset + model weights + data used by the optimizer (ADAM) is too big.
If finetuning an existing GPT-2 model, you must use that BPE tokenizer; you could theoretically use your own but that wouldn't make a difference performance-wise and you'd just have a lot of wasted tokenspace.
The efficiencies of using your own tokenizer for bespoke, esoteric content that does not match typical internet speak (like this) are why I recommend training your own tokenizer and GPT-2 from scratch if possible.