BioNeMo Framework (v2.0)

NVIDIA BioNeMo Framework is a collection of programming tools, libraries, and models for computational drug discovery. It accelerates the most time-consuming and costly stages of building and adapting biomolecular AI models by providing domain-specific, optimized models and tooling that are easily integrated into GPU-based computational resources for the fastest performance on the market. You can access BioNeMo Framework as a free community resource here in this repository or learn more at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/clara/bionemo/ about getting an enterprise license for improved expert-level support.

bionemo2 code is partitioned into independently installable namespace packages. These are located under the sub-packages/ directory. Please refer to PEP 420 – Implicit Namespace Packages for details.

Documentation and Release Information

The latest released container for the BioNeMo Framework is available for download through NGC. Comprehensive documentation, including user guides, API references, and troubleshooting information, can be found in our official documentation set at:

https://docs.nvidia.com/bionemo-framework/latest/

For those interested in exploring the latest developments and features not yet included in the released container, we also maintain an up-to-date documentation set that reflects the current state of the main branch. This in-progress documentation can be accessed at:

https://nvidia.github.io/bionemo-framework/

Please note that while this documentation is generally accurate and helpful, it may contain references to features or APIs not yet stabilized or released. As always, we appreciate feedback on our documentation and strive to continually improve its quality.

Developing and Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO)

By contributing to this repo you acknowledge that either this is your original work, or have the right to submit the work under our license, which as of this writing is Apache v2. See license for the current license, and the contributing document for more information.

If you find yourself having made a number of commits in a PR, and need to sign them all, a useful tool is the following:

1. Find your first unsigned commit, say it is mYcmtShrtHash.
2. Run git rebase --signoff mYcmtShrtHash^ to sign that commit and all future commits (in your branch please).
3. Push the updated commits git push -f.

Initializing 3rd-party dependencies as git submodules

The NeMo and Megatron-LM dependencies are vendored in the bionemo-2 repository workspace as git submodules for development purposes. The pinned commits for these submodules represent the "last-known-good" versions of these packages that are confirmed to be working with bionemo2 (and those that are tested in CI).

To initialize these sub-modules when cloning the repo, add the --recursive flag to the git clone command:

git clone --recursive git@github.com:NVIDIA/bionemo-framework.git

To download the pinned versions of these submodules within an existing git repository, run

git submodule update --init --recursive

Different branches of the repo can have different pinned versions of these third-party submodules. Make sure you update submodules after switching branches or pulling recent changes!

To configure git to automatically update submodules when switching branches, run

git config submodule.recurse true

NOTE: this setting will not download new or remove old submodules with the branch's changes. You will have to run the full git submodule update --init --recursive command in these situations.

First Time Setup

After cloning the repository, you need to run the setup script first:

./internal/scripts/setup_env_file.sh

This will return an exit code of 1 on a first time run.

Release Image Building

To build the release image, run the following script:

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 ./ci/scripts/build_docker_image.sh \
  -regular-docker-builder \
  -image-name "nvcr.io/nvidian/cvai_bnmo_trng/bionemo:bionemo2-$(git rev-parse HEAD)"

Development Image Building

To build the development image, run the following script:

./internal/scripts/build_dev_image.sh

Interactive Shell in Development Image

After building the development image, you can start a container from it and open a bash shell in it by executing:

./internal/scripts/run_dev.sh

Downloading artifacts (For NVIDIA Employees)

Set the AWS access info in environment prior to running the dev-container launch script:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="team-bionemo"
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$(grep aws_secret_access_key ~/.aws/config | cut -d' ' -f 3)
AWS_REGION="us-east-1"
AWS_ENDPOINT_URL="https://pbss.s8k.io"

Running tests downloads the test data to a cache location when first invoked.

For more information on adding new test artifacts, see the documentation in bionemo.core.data.load.

Updating pinned versions of NeMo / Megatron-LM

Pinned commits are bumped by depend-a-bot. To update the pinned commits of NeMo or Megatron-LM manually, checkout the commit of interest in the submodule folder, and then commit the result in the top-level bionemo repository.

cd 3rdparty/NeMo/
git fetch
git checkout <desired_sha>
cd ../..
git add '3rdparty/NeMo/'
git commit -m "updating NeMo commit"

Testing Locally

Inside the development container, run ./ci/scripts/static_checks.sh to validate that code changes will pass the code formatting and license checks run during CI. In addition, run the longer ./ci/scripts/pr_test.sh script to run unit tests for all sub-packages.

Publishing Packages

Add a new git tag

We use setuptools-scm to dynamically determine the library version from git tags. As an example:

$ git tag 2.0.0a1
$ docker build . -t bionemo-uv
$ docker run --rm -it bionemo-uv:latest python -c "from importlib.metadata import version; print(version('bionemo.esm2'))"
2.0.0a1

Bionemo packages follow semantic versioning 2.0 rules: API-breaking changes are MAJOR, new features are MINOR, and bug-fixes and refactors are PATCH in MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH version string format.

If subsequent commits are added after a git tag, the version string will reflect the additional commits (e.g. 2.0.0a1.post1). NOTE: we don't consider uncommitted changes in determining the version string.

Building a python wheel

An overview for publishing packages with uv can be found here: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/publish/

Build the bionemo sub-package project by executing the following for the desired package:

uv build sub-packages/bionemo-core/

Produce a wheel file for the sub-package's code and its dependencies:

$ ls sub-packages/bionemo-core/dist/
bionemo_core-2.0.0a1.post0-py3-none-any.whl  bionemo_core-2.0.0a1.post0.tar.gz

Uploading a python wheel

After building, the wheel file may be uploaded to PyPI (or a compatible package registry) by executing uvx twine upload sub-packages/bionemo-core/dist/*.

All steps together

Assumes we're building a wheel for bionemo-core.

git tag MY-VERSION-TAG
uv build /sub-packages/bionemo-core
TWINE_PASSWORD="<pypi pass>" TWINE_USERNAME="<pypi user>" uvx twine upload /sub-packages/bionemo-core/dist/*

Pydantic Configuration

BioNeMo 2 provides two entrypoints for models with both argparse and pydantic. Both documented in the Models section below. Pydantic based configuration is designed to accept a configuration yaml file as input, along with context specific arguments (e.g., should we resume from existing checkpoints?). These YAML configs go through a Pydantic Validator, in this case referred to as MainConfig. This Config is composed of several other Pydantic models, see the class definition for details. To pre-populate a config with reasonable defaults for various standard models, we provide 'recipes.' These are simple methods that instantiate the config object and then serialize it to a YAML configuration file. From this file, you may either submit it directly, or modify the various parameters to meet your usecase. For example, Weights and biases, devices, precision, and dataset options are all extremely useful to modify. Then, you would submit this config for training.

These two workflows are packaged as executables when esm2 or geneformer are installed with pip. These commands will appear as:

bionemo-geneformer-recipe
bionemo-esm2-recipe
bionemo-geneformer-train
bionemo-esm2-train

Models

ESM-2

Running

First off, we have a utility function for downloading full/test data and model checkpoints called download_bionemo_data that our following examples currently use. This will download the object if it is not already on your local system, and then return the path either way. For example if you run this twice in a row, you should expect the second time you run it to return the path almost instantly.

NOTE: NVIDIA employees should use pbss rather than ngc for the data source.

export MY_DATA_SOURCE="ngc"

or for NVIDIA internal employees with new data etc:

export MY_DATA_SOURCE="pbss"

# The fastest transformer engine environment variables in testing were the following two
TEST_DATA_DIR=$(download_bionemo_data esm2/testdata_esm2_pretrain:2.0 --source $MY_DATA_SOURCE); \
ESM2_650M_CKPT=$(download_bionemo_data esm2/650m:2.0 --source $MY_DATA_SOURCE); \

train_esm2     \
    --train-cluster-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/train_clusters_sanity.parquet     \
    --train-database-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/train_sanity.db     \
    --valid-cluster-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/valid_clusters.parquet     \
    --valid-database-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/validation.db     \
    --result-dir ./results     \
    --experiment-name test_experiment     \
    --num-gpus 1  \
    --num-nodes 1 \
    --val-check-interval 10 \
    --num-dataset-workers 1 \
    --num-steps 10 \
    --max-seq-length 1024 \
    --limit-val-batches 2 \
    --micro-batch-size 2 \
    --restore-from-checkpoint-path ${ESM2_650M_CKPT}

Running with Pydantic configs

Alternatively, we provide a validated and serialized configuration file entrypoint for executing the same workflow. These can be generated using the bionemo-esm2-recipe entrypoints. Recipes are available for 8m, 650m, and 3b ESM2 models. You may select which preset config to use by setting the --recipe parameter. The output is then a serialized configuration file that may be used in the associated bionemo-esm2-train commands.

# The fastest transformer engine environment variables in testing were the following two
TEST_DATA_DIR=$(download_bionemo_data esm2/testdata_esm2_pretrain:2.0 --source $MY_DATA_SOURCE); \
bionemo-esm2-recipe \
--train-cluster-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/train_clusters_sanity.parquet     \
--train-database-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/train_sanity.db     \
--valid-cluster-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/valid_clusters.parquet     \
--valid-database-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/2024_03_sanity/validation.db     \
--result-dir ./results     \
--dest my_config.yaml\
--recipe esm2_8m_recipe

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Inspect and edit the contents of the outputted my_config.yaml as you see fit

NOTE: To continue training from an existing checkpoint, simply pass in the path --initial-ckpt-path to the recipe command. This will populate the YAML with the correct field to ensure pretraining is initialized from an existing checkpoint.

To submit a training job with the passed config, first update the yaml file with any additional execution parameters of your choosing: number of devices, workers, steps, etc. Second, invoke our training entrypoint. To do this, we need three things:

• Configuration file, the YAML produced by the previous step
• Model config type, in this case the pretraining config. This will validate the arguments in the config YAML against those required for pretraining. Alternatively, things like fine-tuning with custom task heads may be specified here. This allows for mixing/matching Data Modules with various tasks.
• Data Config type, this specifies how to parse, validate, and prepare the DataModule. This may change depending on task, for example, pretraining ESM2 uses a protein cluster oriented sampling method. In the case of inference or fine-tuning a pretrained model, a simple fasta file may be sufficient. There is a one-to-one relationship between DataConfig types and DataModule types.

⚠️ Warning: This setup does NO configuration of Weights and Biases. Edit your config YAML and populate it with your WandB details.

bionemo-esm2-train \
--data-config-cls bionemo.esm2.run.config_models.ESM2DataConfig \
--model-config-cls bionemo.esm2.run.config_models.ExposedESM2PretrainConfig \
--config my_config.yaml

NOTE: both data-config-cls and model-config-cls have default values corresponding to ESM2DataConfig and ExposedESM2PretrainingConfig

DataConfigCls and ModelConfigCls can also refer to locally defined types by the user. As long as python knows how to import the specified path, they may be configured. For example, you may have a custom Dataset/DataModule that you would like to mix with an existing recipe. In this case, you define a DataConfig object with the generic specified as your DataModule type, and then pass in the config type to the training recipe.

Geneformer

Running

Similar to ESM-2, you can download the dataset and checkpoint through our utility function.

TEST_DATA_DIR=$(download_bionemo_data single_cell/testdata-20241203 --source $MY_DATA_SOURCE); \
GENEFORMER_10M_CKPT=$(download_bionemo_data geneformer/10M_240530:2.0 --source $MY_DATA_SOURCE); \
train_geneformer     \
    --data-dir ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/cellxgene_2023-12-15_small_processed_scdl    \
    --result-dir ./results     \
    --restore-from-checkpoint-path ${GENEFORMER_10M_CKPT} \
    --experiment-name test_experiment     \
    --num-gpus 1  \
    --num-nodes 1 \
    --val-check-interval 10 \
    --num-dataset-workers 0 \
    --num-steps 55 \
    --seq-length 128 \
    --limit-val-batches 2 \
    --micro-batch-size 2

To fine-tune, you to specify a different combination of model and loss. Pass the path to the outputted config file from the previous step as the --restore-from-checkpoint-path, and also change --training-model-config-class to the newly created model-config-class.

While no CLI option currently exists to hot swap in different data modules and processing functions now, you could copy the sub-projects/bionemo-geneformer/geneformer/scripts/train_geneformer.py and modify the DataModule class that gets initialized.

Simple fine-tuning example (NOTE: please change --restore-from-checkpoint-path to be the checkpoint directory path that was output last by the previous train run)

TEST_DATA_DIR=$(download_bionemo_data single_cell/testdata-20241203 --source $MY_DATA_SOURCE); \
train_geneformer     \
    --data-dir ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/cellxgene_2023-12-15_small_processed_scdl    \
    --result-dir ./results     \
    --experiment-name test_finettune_experiment     \
    --num-gpus 1  \
    --num-nodes 1 \
    --val-check-interval 10 \
    --num-dataset-workers 0 \
    --num-steps 55 \
    --seq-length 128 \
    --limit-val-batches 2 \
    --micro-batch-size 2 \
    --training-model-config-class FineTuneSeqLenBioBertConfig \
    --restore-from-checkpoint-path results/test_experiment/dev/checkpoints/test_experiment--val_loss=4.3506-epoch=1-last

Running with Pydantic configs

Alternatively, we provide a validated and serialized configuration file entrypoint for executing the same workflow. Recipes are available for 10m, and 106m geneformer models. Additionally we provide an example recipe of finetuning, where the objective is to 'regress' on token IDs rather than the traditional masked language model approach. In practice, you will likely need to implement your own DataModule, DataConfig, and Finetuning model. You can use the same overall approach, but with customizations for your task.

TEST_DATA_DIR=$(download_bionemo_data single_cell/testdata-20241203 --source $MY_DATA_SOURCE); \
bionemo-geneformer-recipe \
    --recipe 10m-pretrain \
    --dest my_config.json \
    --data-path ${TEST_DATA_DIR}/cellxgene_2023-12-15_small_processed_scdl \
    --result-dir ./results

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Inspect and edit the contents of the outputted my_config.yaml as you see fit

NOTE: To pretrain from an existing checkpoint, simply pass in the path --initial-ckpt-path to the recipe command. This will populate the YAML with the correct field to ensure pretraining is initialized from an existing checkpoint.

To submit a training job with the passed config, first update the yaml file with any additional execution parameters of your choosing: number of devices, workers, steps, etc. Second, invoke our training entrypoint. To do this, we need three things:

• Configuration file, the YAML produced by the previous step
• Model config type, in this case the pretraining config. This will validate the arguments in the config YAML against those required for pretraining. Alternatively, things like fine-tuning with custom task heads may be specified here. This allows for mixing/matching Data Modules with various tasks.
• Data Config type, this specifies how to parse, validate, and prepare the DataModule. This may change depending on task, for example, while fine-tuning you may want to use a custom Dataset/DataModule that includes PERTURB-seq. In this case, the default pretraining DataConfig and DataModule will be insufficient. See ESM2 for additional example usecases.

⚠️ Warning: This setup does NO configuration of Weights and Biases. Edit your config YAML and populate it with your WandB details.

bionemo-geneformer-train \
--data-config-cls bionemo.geneformer.run.config_models.GeneformerPretrainingDataConfig \
--model-config-cls bionemo.geneformer.run.config_models.ExposedGeneformerPretrainConfig \
--config my_config.yaml

NOTE: both data-config-cls and model-config-cls have default values corresponding to GeneformerPretrainingDataConfig and ExposedGeneformerPretrainConfig

DataConfigCls and ModelConfigCls can also refer to locally defined types by the user. As long as python knows how to import the specified path, they may be configured. For example, you may have a custom Dataset/DataModule that you would like to mix with an existing recipe. In this case, you define a DataConfig object with the generic specified as your DataModule type, and then pass in the config type to the training recipe.

Updating License Header on Python Files

If you add new Python (.py) files, be sure to run our license-check. If you have not already done sone, please install the dev-requirements.txt. If you are working directly inside a release container, you may need to manually install these. We recommend using the developer container for contributions.

pip install -r dev-requirements.txt --user
python ./scripts/license_check.py --modify --replace --license-header ./license_header -c sub-packages/ -c docs/ -c scripts/ -c ci/ -c internal/

Updating the secrets baseline file

If false-positives are raised by the detect-secrets pre-commit hook, they can be added to the baseline files by running the following commands:

detect-secrets scan --baseline .secrets.baseline --exclude-files '(.*\.ipynb|.*\.baseline)$'
detect-secrets scan --baseline .secrets-nb.baseline --exclude-files '^.(?!.*\.ipynb)' --exclude-lines '"(hash|id|image/\w+)":.*'

The resulting altered baseline files should then be committed.

UV-based python packaging

BioNeMo FW is migrating to use uv (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) for handling python packaging inside our docker containers. In addition to streamlining how we specify intra-repo dependencies, it allows us to create a uv lockfile to pin our dependencies for our bionemo docker container.

We'll maintain two images going forward:

2. An image that derives from nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch that will be our performance baseline. The advantage of this image base is that the performance of pytorch is validated by the NVIDIA pytorch team, but the downsides are that (1) the overall image size is quite large, and (2) using uv sync to install a pinned virtual environment is not possible with the existing python environment in the ngc image.

3. An image that derives from nvcr.io/nvidia/cuda, where we use uv to create the python environment from scratch. This image uses pytorch wheels from https://download.pytorch.org.

Currently, the devcontainer derives from the cuda-based image above, while the release image derives from the pytorch image.

Runnings tests inside the CUDA container.

docker run --rm -it \
    -v ${HOME}/.aws:/home/bionemo/.aws \
    -v ${HOME}/.ngc:/home/bionemo/.ngc \
    -v ${PWD}:/home/bionemo/ \
    -v ${HOME}/.cache:/home/bionemo/.cache \
    -e HOST_UID=$(id -u) \
    -e HOST_GID=$(id -g) \
    --gpus=all --ipc=host --ulimit memlock=-1 --ulimit stack=67108864 \
    bionemo-uv:latest \
    py.test sub-packages/ scripts/