Why does the example not use the prepare data hook?
I would expect the out of the box example to use the proper prepare_data hook to enable multi node training. Is there a reason that the mnist data is downloaded in main rather than in the style of the sample from the blog post?

If relevant I'd be happy to contribute a patch.

  
    
      pytorch-lightning/pl_examples/basic_examples/mnist.py
    
    
         Line 86
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           dataset = MNIST('', train=True, download=True, transform=transforms.ToTensor())