rabit

Rabit is a term that may refer to more than one topic. Most commonly, it is a misspelling of rabbit, the small mammal in the family Leporidae. The standard English spelling is rabbit, with common forms including domestic rabbit and wild rabbit. The word rabit has appeared in various texts as an orthographic error or, in some languages, a transliteration, but it does not designate a distinct biological entity in English.

In computing, Rabit (capital R) refers to an open-source distributed computing library used to implement collective communication primitives in machine learning systems. Developed within the DMLC project, Rabit provides basic primitives such as reliable allreduce and broadcast to coordinate parameters and gradients across multiple workers during distributed training. It is designed to be backend-agnostic, running over MPI, TCP sockets, or other transports, and to be easily integrated with frameworks like XGBoost and Apache MXNet. Rabit emphasizes simplicity, portability, and fault-tolerant startup synchronization, enabling more efficient and robust distributed execution.

The library is typically used to support synchronous or semi-synchronous training workflows, where multiple computing nodes work on parts of a model or dataset and must periodically combine results. While Rabit is not the only tool for distributed communication in machine learning, it has been adopted in several open-source projects within the ML ecosystem for its lightweight interface and cross-platform compatibility.