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Parameter Golf Competition Data
Pre-tokenized FineWeb shards for the OpenAI Parameter Golf competition. Multiple SentencePiece vocab sizes plus a corrected byte-exact Scylla (TokenMonster) tokenization. Free checkpoint persistence API. Zero setup friction.
⚠️ Important: Scylla v1 Deprecated
The original fineweb_scylla/ directory uses the 998-token vocab from PR #1143. That vocab's byte-accounting metadata treated TokenMonster tokens as context-free, which overcounts source bytes by ~4%. Any val_bpb reported through the standard pipeline on fineweb_scylla/ is inflated by roughly the same factor.
The bug is tracked in Issue #897 and corrected in PR #1314 (simon-marcus, "Scylla: Corrected Byte-Exact Tokenizer Path"). The corrected path uses a full byte-native TokenMonster regime (charset=none, capcode=0, normalization=none, explicit 0x00–0xFF byte fallback) and is byte-exact on the fixed FineWeb validation text.
Use fineweb_scylla_v2/ for any new work. Old fineweb_scylla/ is kept for reproducibility of past runs and will not be deleted, but should not be used for new BPB comparisons.
How It Works (The Simple Version)
Think of it like plumbing:
- The reservoir is this dataset — competition data, pre-processed and ready to flow.
- The pipe is
huggingface-cli download— one command, and data flows to your GPU pod. Fast, resumable. If the pipe breaks mid-transfer, reconnect and it picks up where it left off. - Your pod is the sink — data arrives at
/workspace/data/, ready to use. No processing, no conversion, no waiting. - The safety valve is checkpoint persistence — every N steps, your training progress flows out to cloud storage. Pod dies? New pod picks up the flow from the last save. No lost work.
That's it. Data flows in. Checkpoints flow out. You train in between.
Step by Step
I just want to train. What do I do?
# Step 1: Install huggingface-cli (if you don't have it)
pip install huggingface-hub
# Step 2: Download the competition data (SP1024 default)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp1024/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# Step 3: That's it. Train.
python train_gpt.py --data_dir /workspace/data/fineweb_sp1024
I want a bigger vocab:
# SP4096 — good middle ground
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp4096/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# SP8192 — a step up in vocab capacity
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp8192/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
I want to save checkpoints so I don't lose work:
# After every N steps in your training script, save:
curl -X PUT \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN" \
--data-binary @checkpoint.pt \
https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com/put/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/my-run/checkpoint.pt
# On a new pod, resume:
curl -o checkpoint.pt \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN" \
"https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com/download?run_id=my-run&filename=checkpoint.pt"
I want the fully automated experience:
Use our RunPod template: matotezitanka/proteus-pytorch:community
Set these env vars before launch:
PGOLF_DATA=sp1024(orsp4096,sp8192,sp12288,sp16384, orscylla_v2)PGOLF_SHARDS=full(orminifor testing)PGOLF_GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_yourtoken(optional, for checkpoints)PGOLF_USER=yourgithubname(optional)PGOLF_RUN=my-experiment-1(optional)
Hit deploy. SSH in when it's ready. Everything is there.
Comprehensive Guide
Available Data
| Tokenizer | Vocab | Size | Use case |
|---|---|---|---|
| SP1024 | 1024 tokens | ~15 GB | Competition default. Most PRs use this. |
| SP4096 | 4096 tokens | ~12 GB | Larger vocab, shorter sequences per doc. |
| SP8192 | 8192 tokens | ~11 GB | Common for bigram/mixer submissions. |
| SP12288 | 12288 tokens | ~10 GB | Explores the 8k–16k vocab range. |
| SP16384 | 16384 tokens | ~9 GB | Largest SentencePiece variant we publish. |
| byte260 | 260 tokens | ~40 GB | Pure-byte tokenization. Bytes 0x00..0xFF → ids 0..255 directly. Reserved specials: pad=256, bos=257, eos=258, unk=259. Encoding is [257] + list(text.encode("utf-8")). No SentencePiece model involved. ~195 train + 2 val shards (byte density is ~4× SP1024). |
| Scylla v2 | 1254 tokens | ~17 GB | Corrected TokenMonster byte-exact tokenizer (PR #1314). Leaderboard-comparable BPB. |
| ~~~11 GB~~ | Deprecated — buggy byte accounting (Issue #897). Kept for reproducibility only. |
Each directory contains 80 training shards + 1 validation shard + tokenizer models.
Download Options
# === DATA SELECTION ===
# SP1024 — competition default (~15 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp1024/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# SP4096 — 4k vocab (~12 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp4096/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# SP8192 — 8k vocab (~11 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp8192/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# SP12288 — 12k vocab (~10 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp12288/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# SP16384 — 16k vocab (~9 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_sp16384/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# byte260 — UTF-8 bytes + 4 reserved specials, no tokenizer training (~40 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_byte260/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# Scylla v2 — corrected TokenMonster 1254-token vocab (~17 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_scylla_v2/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# Legacy Scylla v1 — 998-token vocab, deprecated (use v2 instead)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "fineweb_scylla/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# All datasets + all tokenizers (~70 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --local-dir /workspace/data
# Just tokenizer models (tiny, < 2 MB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data --include "tokenizers/*" --local-dir /workspace/data
# === SHARD SUBSETS (save time/bandwidth) ===
# Mini — 10 shards for smoke tests (~2 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data \
--include "fineweb_sp1024/fineweb_train_00000?.bin" \
--include "fineweb_sp1024/fineweb_val*" \
--local-dir /workspace/data
# Half — 40 shards (~7 GB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data \
--include "fineweb_sp1024/fineweb_train_0000[0-3]?.bin" \
--include "fineweb_sp1024/fineweb_val*" \
--local-dir /workspace/data
# Val only — just validation data (~200 MB)
huggingface-cli download LightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-data \
--include "fineweb_sp1024/fineweb_val*" \
--local-dir /workspace/data
No HuggingFace account required. This is a public dataset. No login, no token, no signup.
Downloads are resumable. If your connection drops, re-run the same command and it picks up where it left off.
Checkpoint Persistence API
Save and resume training across pod preemptions. Your GitHub token is your identity — no accounts to create.
# === CHECKPOINT API (https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com) ===
# Upload a checkpoint
curl -X POST https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com/upload \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ghp_yourtoken" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"run_id": "my-run", "filename": "checkpoint_step500.pt"}'
# Then PUT the file
curl -X PUT https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com/put/yourusername/my-run/checkpoint_step500.pt \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ghp_yourtoken" \
--data-binary @checkpoint_step500.pt
# Download a checkpoint
curl -o checkpoint.pt \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ghp_yourtoken" \
"https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com/download?run_id=my-run&filename=checkpoint_step500.pt"
# List your checkpoints
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ghp_yourtoken" \
"https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com/list?run_id=my-run"
# Delete a run's checkpoints
curl -X DELETE -H "Authorization: Bearer ghp_yourtoken" \
"https://pgolf-api.lightspeedup.com/clean?run_id=my-run"
Limits: 10 checkpoints per user, 2 GB max each. Auto-deleted after 7 days.
Docker Image
docker pull matotezitanka/proteus-pytorch:community
Includes: PyTorch 2.11.0 + CUDA 12.8 + Flash Attention 3 + all competition deps (brotli, tokenmonster, sentencepiece) + tools (cpu_test.py, retokenizer, swap_pytorch.sh) + automated boot script.
Works on RunPod, Vast.ai, or any Docker host with NVIDIA GPUs.
Data Integrity
Every file has a SHA256 checksum. After downloading:
cd /workspace/data
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt
If any checksum fails, re-download that file. The download is resumable — you won't re-download files that are already correct.
Dataset Structure
parameter-golf-data/
├── fineweb_sp1024/ # 80 train + 1 val, SentencePiece BPE 1024
├── fineweb_sp4096/ # 80 train + 1 val, SentencePiece BPE 4096
├── fineweb_sp8192/ # 80 train + 1 val, SentencePiece BPE 8192
├── fineweb_sp12288/ # 80 train + 1 val, SentencePiece BPE 12288
├── fineweb_sp16384/ # 80 train + 1 val, SentencePiece BPE 16384
├── fineweb_byte260/ # ~195 train + 2 val shards, pure-byte (PureByteTokenizer: pad=0, bos=1, eos=2, unk=3, bytes 4..259)
├── fineweb_scylla_v2/ # 80 train + 1 val, corrected TokenMonster 1254-token (PR #1314)
├── fineweb_scylla/ # DEPRECATED — 998-token buggy vocab, kept for reproducibility
├── tokenizers/
│ ├── fineweb_1024_bpe.model (SP1024 SentencePiece)
│ ├── fineweb_4096_bpe.model (SP4096 SentencePiece)
│ ├── fineweb_8192_bpe.model (SP8192 SentencePiece)
│ ├── fineweb_12288_bpe.model (SP12288 SentencePiece)
│ ├── fineweb_16384_bpe.model (SP16384 SentencePiece)
│ ├── scylla_v2/scylla.yaml (TokenMonster 1254, corrected)
│ ├── scylla_v2/scylla.meta.npz (byte LUTs, byte-exact)
│ ├── scylla/candidate.vocab (TokenMonster 998, deprecated)
│ └── scylla/candidate.meta.npz (old byte LUTs, overcounts)
├── SHA256SUMS.txt
└── PATENTS.md
Security & Privacy
We believe in transparency. Here's exactly what we can and can't see.
What we CAN access (technically)
- Your checkpoint files — they're stored in our Cloudflare R2 bucket. We have admin access to the bucket. We don't look at them, but we could.
- Your checkpoint metadata — filenames, sizes, upload timestamps. This is visible in the R2 dashboard.
- Request logs — Cloudflare logs request metadata (IP addresses, timestamps, URLs) by default. We do not add any additional logging.
- Your GitHub username — extracted from your token to scope your storage namespace.
What we CANNOT access
- Your training code — it runs on your pod, never touches our infrastructure.
- Your model weights (unless you upload them as a checkpoint).
- Your GitHub token contents — the token transits our Worker to call GitHub's API, but it is NOT stored, NOT logged, and NOT persisted anywhere. It's used once per request for authentication and discarded.
- Other users' data — the Worker enforces namespace isolation. Your GitHub username is your storage prefix. You cannot read, list, or delete another user's checkpoints.
What we DO NOT do
- We do NOT sell, share, or analyze your data.
- We do NOT train models on your checkpoints.
- We do NOT log your GitHub token value.
- We do NOT track your usage beyond standard Cloudflare request metrics.
What we disclose
- The checkpoint API Worker code is in our private repo. We plan to open-source it.
- Cloudflare's privacy policy applies to request metadata: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/
- Checkpoints are automatically deleted after 7 days. We do not keep backups.
If you don't trust us
That's fair. You can:
- Use just the HF dataset — no account, no tokens, no interaction with our API. Just
huggingface-cli download. - Save checkpoints locally — skip the API entirely. Save to
/workspace/and accept the risk of losing work on preemption. - Inspect the Worker — we'll open-source it. Until then, the API surface is 5 endpoints, ~150 lines of JavaScript, zero dependencies.
Provenance
- Source: FineWeb (CommonCrawl-derived, by Hugging Face). Our docs come from the
willdepueoai/parameter-golfcompetition mirror. - SP1024 tokenization: SentencePiece BPE, 1024 tokens — from the openai/parameter-golf competition repo,
data/tokenizer_specs.json. - SP4096 / SP8192 / SP12288 / SP16384 tokenizations: SentencePiece BPE models trained by LightSpeedUp on 1 M FineWeb docs decoded byte-exactly from the canonical SP1024 shards (SP1024 uses
byte_fallback=True, so the decode is lossless). Trainer settings mirror the competition'sbuild_sentencepiece_tokenizer:character_coverage=0.999,byte_fallback=True,split_digits=True,normalization_rule_name=nmt_nfkc,add_dummy_prefix=False,hard_vocab_limit=False. - byte260 tokenization: direct UTF-8 byte mapping. Vocab 260 = 256 bytes + 4 reserved specials. Bytes
0x00..0xFFmap to ids0..255directly (no offset). Reserved specials:pad_id=256, bos_id=257, eos_id=258, unk_id=259. Encoding is[257] + list(text.encode("utf-8"));append_eos=False. No SentencePiece model involved. Byte-accounting LUT is trivial:base_bytes_lut[tok] = 1 if tok < 256 else 0. Note on convention: this differs from theopenai/parameter-golfPureByteTokenizerdefaults (which put specials at 0..3 and offset bytes to 4..259). When loading these shards into the canonicaltrain_gpt.py --variant byte260path, use a loader that matches the convention above. - Scylla v2 tokenization: corrected byte-exact TokenMonster vocab (1254 tokens, logical 1178,
bos_id=1253) from @simon-marcus's PR #1314. Regime:charset=none,capcode=0,normalization=none, explicit full byte fallback, latin-1 byte interpretation, synthetic zero-byte BOS per doc. - Scylla v1 tokenization (deprecated): original 998-token TokenMonster vocab from @simon-marcus's PR #1143. Superseded by v2 due to the byte-accounting issue in Issue #897.
- No modification to token sequences on any variant — byte-identical to what you'd produce by running the same pipeline yourself.
Attribution Chain
CommonCrawl (CC-BY) → Hugging Face FineWeb (ODC-By 1.0) → willdepueoai/parameter-golf (ODC-By 1.0) → This dataset (ODC-By 1.0)
License
Data: Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By 1.0)
Code & Tools: Apache 2.0 — see PATENTS.md
Related Community Resources
sproos/parameter-golf-tokenizers— a complementary community mirror that publishesfineweb10B_{sp1024, sp2048, sp4096, sp8192}/pre-tokenized shards plus the corresponding SentencePiece.model/.vocabfiles. If you only need the SP variants in the 1K–8K vocab range, sproos is a direct source. OurLightSpeedUp/parameter-golf-datadrop is complementary: we add the larger SP variants (12288, 16384), the corrected Scylla v2, and byte260, and we bundle the free checkpoint-persistence API + Docker image for end-to-end training on free-tier GPUs.
Roadmap
- Cloudflare R2 mirror for HF-rate-limited users (coming soon)
- Automated checkpoint save/resume in the boot script
- Open-source the CF Worker code
Community
- The Agora — live leaderboard + compliance tracker
- Issue #942 — compute resources discussion
- Issue #140 — competition discussion thread
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