[Feature] Add --distributed-timeout-seconds CLI option (#36047)

Signed-off-by: Shiyan Deng <dsy842974287@meta.com>
Co-authored-by: Lu Fang <30275821+houseroad@users.noreply.github.com>

vllm/config/parallel.py

@@ -234,9 +234,15 @@ class ParallelConfig:
     """distributed node rank for multi-node distributed 
     inference when distributed_executor_backend is mp."""
     nnodes: int = 1
-    """num of nodes for multi-node distributed 
+    """num of nodes for multi-node distributed
     inference when distributed_executor_backend is mp."""
 
+    distributed_timeout_seconds: int | None = None
+    """Timeout in seconds for distributed operations (e.g., init_process_group).
+    If set, this value is passed to torch.distributed.init_process_group as the
+    timeout parameter. If None, PyTorch's default timeout is used (600s for NCCL).
+    Increase this for multi-node setups where model downloads may be slow."""
+
     world_size: int = Field(init=False)
     """world_size is TPxPP, it affects the number of workers we create."""