- unshard() and full_tensor() are collective ops, all ranks must participate
- Old code returned None on non-rank-0 before calling unshard, causing deadlock
- Fix: all ranks unshard/full_tensor, only rank-0 keeps the result
- Move create_ref_model to parallel/utils.py, accept executor+model directly
- Guard create_ref_model and sync_old_model against None on non-rank-0