Concepts#
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Volunteer | A person who lends their GPU to training. Runs the desktop app under a pseudonym; no personal data. |
| Worker | The training process on the volunteer's machine (istemci/isci.py, started by the app as a child process). |
| Coordinator | The server that runs rounds and holds the adapter. Hands out tasks, validates and averages worker results. |
| Portal | modelen.tr: accounts, coordinator applications and approval, the public directory, the Portal API. |
| Base model | A frozen open language model. Currently only Qwen3-0.6B-Base (Apache-2.0). Lives on the volunteer's disk; never crosses the network. |
| LoRA adapter | Small trainable weights attached to the base model. Here r=16 on all linear layers: 392 tensors, ~10.1 M parameters, ~40.4 MB (float32). |
| Fine-tuning | Adapting a ready-made model with new data. In Modelen this means freezing the base model and training only the LoRA adapter. |
| Round | One coordinator cycle: hand out tasks → workers train → results collected → average + outer step → new adapter. |
| H (inner steps) | Local steps a worker takes per round (ic_adim, default 20). Synchronisation happens every H steps, not every step. |
| DiLoCo | Distributed training with infrequent synchronisation: workers take many local steps, then merge via the coordinator. |
| Outer step | The optimiser step the coordinator applies to the worker average (reference: Nesterov, lr 1.0, momentum 0.5). |
Data shard (parca) | One of n_parca equal parts of the training data; each worker is assigned one. If the coordinator serves data (--veri), the worker downloads only its own shard. |
| Heartbeat | The coordinator telling the portal "I'm alive" (see Heartbeat). |
| Address verification | A .well-known file check proving the coordinator address is yours. |
| API key | An mdl_... key for the Portal API. Created in the panel, shown once. |
| Protocol v1 | The HTTP contract between the volunteer app and a coordinator (details). |
| API v1 | The JSON interface the portal exposes to coordinators (details). |
Not
The protocol and the API are different things. The protocol is between the volunteer app and your coordinator. The Portal API is between you and the Modelen portal (applications, heartbeat, directory).