lightly-ai/lightly

Proper distributed tests

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#1,982 opened on Jul 14, 2026

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Description

We do some proper distributed tests in tests/utils/test_dist__gather__losses.py, however those are separate from the test modules of the individual losses so adding new losses always gets forgotten or we try to mock the distributed behaviour, which often does not work very well, e.g. in #1980 .

Instead, it would be nice to have a shared distributed context that we could submit distributed tests to. This should run entirely on CPU (gloo backend for PyTorch). A really nice example for this is torchmetrics.

Let me know if you'd like to work on this and I will give some more proper guidance and detail on how this can be done.

Contributor guide

Research direction
Examine the torchmetrics conftest example and integrate a similar shared distributed context using gloo backend into the test suite.
Tech stack
python
Domain
testing qa
Issue type
Feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
Half day
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Mostly clear
Prerequisites
PythonPyTorchDistributed testing
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
75