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Jul 29

TokenRing: An Efficient Parallelism Framework for Infinite-Context LLMs via Bidirectional Communication

Efficient parallelization of Large Language Models (LLMs) with long sequences is essential but challenging due to their significant computational and memory demands, particularly stemming from communication bottlenecks in attention mechanisms. While sequence parallelism (SP) has been introduced as a potential solution, existing methods often suffer from limited scalability or inefficiency, rendering their effectiveness. Ring-Attention demonstrates the potential for scaling sequence processing but faces significant limitations due to its reliance on peer-to-peer (P2P) communication and inefficient utilization of network resources. As the degree of SP increases, the quadratic decrease in computation time per step contrasts sharply with the linear reduction in communication volume, exacerbating communication bottlenecks. To address these challenges, we propose TokenRing, a fine-grained parallel framework that leverages bidirectional P2P communication to effectively overlap computation and data transmission. By partitioning the attention block and concurrently transmitting Query and block outputs (i.e., block_out and block_lse) within a fully connected mesh topology, TokenRing achieves significant reductions in communication overhead and better load balancing. These innovations improve the scalability and efficiency of distributed Transformer models, particularly for long-context sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that TokenRing enhances throughput and reduces communication latency. Moreover, its design adapts seamlessly to various multi-GPU interconnect solutions, such as Huawei Ascend, ensuring broad compatibility and cost-effectiveness for distributed LLM inference and training. The code is available at: https://github.com/ACA-Lab-SJTU/token-ring.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 29, 2024

Sequence Parallelism: Long Sequence Training from System Perspective

Transformer achieves promising results on various tasks. However, self-attention suffers from quadratic memory requirements with respect to the sequence length. Existing work focuses on reducing time and space complexity from an algorithm perspective. In this work, we propose sequence parallelism, a memory-efficient parallelism method to help us break input sequence length limitation and train with longer sequences on GPUs efficiently. Our approach is compatible with most existing parallelisms (e.g. data parallelism, pipeline parallelism and tensor parallelism), which means our sequence parallelism makes 4D parallelism possible. More importantly, we no longer require a single device to hold the whole sequence. That is, with sparse attention, our sequence parallelism enables us to train transformer with infinite long sequence. Specifically, we split the input sequence into multiple chunks and feed each chunk into its corresponding device (i.e. GPU). To compute the attention output, we integrated ring-style communication with self-attention calculation and proposed Ring Self-Attention (RSA). Experiments show that sequence parallelism performs well when scaling with batch size and sequence length. Compared with tensor parallelism, our approach achieved 13.7times and 3.0times maximum batch size and sequence length respectively when scaling up to 64 NVIDIA P100 GPUs. With sparse attention, sequence can handle sequence with over 114K tokens, which is over 27times longer than existing sparse attention works holding the whole sequence on a single device.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26, 2021

Efficient Training on Multiple Consumer GPUs with RoundPipe

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on consumer-grade GPUs is highly cost-effective, yet constrained by limited GPU memory and slow PCIe interconnects. Pipeline parallelism combined with CPU offloading mitigates these hardware bottlenecks by reducing communication overhead. However, existing PP schedules suffer from an inherent limitation termed the weight binding issue. Binding uneven model stages (e.g., the LM head is large) to GPUs limits the pipeline's throughput to that of the GPU with the heaviest load, leading to severe pipeline bubbles. In this paper, we propose RoundPipe, a novel pipeline schedule that breaks the weight binding constraint on consumer GPU servers. RoundPipe treats GPUs as a pool of stateless execution workers and dynamically dispatches computation stages across devices in a round-robin manner, achieving a near-zero-bubble pipeline. To ensure training correctness and system efficiency, RoundPipe integrates a priority-aware transfer scheduling engine, a fine-grained distributed event-based synchronization protocol, and an automated layer partitioning algorithm. Evaluations on an 8times RTX 4090 server demonstrate that RoundPipe achieves 1.48--2.16times speedups over state-of-the-art baselines when fine-tuning 1.7B to 32B models. Remarkably, RoundPipe enables LoRA fine-tuning of the Qwen3-235B model with 31K sequence length on a single server. RoundPipe is publicly available as an open-source Python library with comprehensive documentation.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 28 3

Pipette: Automatic Fine-grained Large Language Model Training Configurator for Real-World Clusters

Training large language models (LLMs) is known to be challenging because of the huge computational and memory capacity requirements. To address these issues, it is common to use a cluster of GPUs with 3D parallelism, which splits a model along the data batch, pipeline stage, and intra-layer tensor dimensions. However, the use of 3D parallelism produces the additional challenge of finding the optimal number of ways on each dimension and mapping the split models onto the GPUs. Several previous studies have attempted to automatically find the optimal configuration, but many of these lacked several important aspects. For instance, the heterogeneous nature of the interconnect speeds is often ignored. While the peak bandwidths for the interconnects are usually made equal, the actual attained bandwidth varies per link in real-world clusters. Combined with the critical path modeling that does not properly consider the communication, they easily fall into sub-optimal configurations. In addition, they often fail to consider the memory requirement per GPU, often recommending solutions that could not be executed. To address these challenges, we propose Pipette, which is an automatic fine-grained LLM training configurator for real-world clusters. By devising better performance models along with the memory estimator and fine-grained individual GPU assignment, Pipette achieves faster configurations that satisfy the memory constraints. We evaluated Pipette on large clusters to show that it provides a significant speedup over the prior art. The implementation of Pipette is available at https://github.com/yimjinkyu1/date2024_pipette.

  • 7 authors
·
May 28, 2024

One-Step Gradient Delay is Not a Barrier for Large-Scale Asynchronous Pipeline Parallel LLM Pretraining

Modern large-scale LLM pretraining benefits from utilizing Pipeline Parallelism; however, synchronous implementations leave GPUs idle during pipeline bubbles, wasting computational resources. Asynchronous Pipeline Parallelism eliminates these bubbles, maximizing throughput at the cost of gradient staleness. Among asynchronous schedules, PipeDream-2BW is particularly appealing: unlike the original PipeDream schedule, it ensures a constant one-step gradient delay regardless of pipeline depth. However, its adoption remains limited due to the common belief that optimizing under staleness is fundamentally unstable. In this work, we challenge this assumption, demonstrating that degradation under one-step delay depends strongly on optimizer choice rather than being an intrinsic limitation. We provide the first comprehensive empirical analysis showing that while AdamW, the predominant optimizer at the time when PipeDream-2BW was introduced, indeed suffers from severe degradation, recent methods like Muon exhibit strong robustness under a one-step delay. We introduce an optimizer-agnostic Error Feedback-inspired correction to further mitigate delay effects. We provide supporting theoretical analysis demonstrating convergence for Muon with and without this correction. Extensive evaluation on models up to 10B parameters confirms that our strategies bridge the performance gap with synchronous training, highlighting the practical potential of asynchronous pipeline parallelism at scale.

Holmes: Towards Distributed Training Across Clusters with Heterogeneous NIC Environment

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, OPT, and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in a wide range of tasks. However, training these models can incur significant expenses, often requiring tens of thousands of GPUs for months of continuous operation. Typically, this training is carried out in specialized GPU clusters equipped with homogeneous high-speed Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network interface cards (NICs). The acquisition and maintenance of such dedicated clusters is challenging. Current LLM training frameworks, like Megatron-LM and Megatron-DeepSpeed, focus primarily on optimizing training within homogeneous cluster settings. In this paper, we introduce Holmes, a training framework for LLMs that employs thoughtfully crafted data and model parallelism strategies over the heterogeneous NIC environment. Our primary technical contribution lies in a novel scheduling method that intelligently allocates distinct computational tasklets in LLM training to specific groups of GPU devices based on the characteristics of their connected NICs. Furthermore, our proposed framework, utilizing pipeline parallel techniques, demonstrates scalability to multiple GPU clusters, even in scenarios without high-speed interconnects between nodes in distinct clusters. We conducted comprehensive experiments that involved various scenarios in the heterogeneous NIC environment. In most cases, our framework achieves performance levels close to those achievable with homogeneous RDMA-capable networks (InfiniBand or RoCE), significantly exceeding training efficiency within the pure Ethernet environment. Additionally, we verified that our framework outperforms other mainstream LLM frameworks under heterogeneous NIC environment in terms of training efficiency and can be seamlessly integrated with them.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

GNNPipe: Scaling Deep GNN Training with Pipelined Model Parallelism

Communication is a key bottleneck for distributed graph neural network (GNN) training. This paper proposes GNNPipe, a new approach that scales the distributed full-graph deep GNN training. Being the first to use layer-level model parallelism for GNN training, GNNPipe partitions GNN layers among GPUs, each device performs the computation for a disjoint subset of consecutive GNN layers on the whole graph. Compared to graph parallelism with each GPU handling a graph partition, GNNPipe reduces the communication volume by a factor of the number of GNN layers. GNNPipe overcomes the unique challenges for pipelined layer-level model parallelism on the whole graph by partitioning it into dependent chunks, allowing the use of historical vertex embeddings, and applying specific training techniques to ensure convergence. We also propose a hybrid approach by combining GNNPipe with graph parallelism to handle large graphs, achieve better computer resource utilization and ensure model convergence. We build a general GNN training system supporting all three parallelism setting. Extensive experiments show that our method reduces the per-epoch training time by up to 2.45x (on average 1.58x) and reduces the communication volume and overhead by up to 22.89x and 27.21x (on average 8.69x and 11.60x), respectively, while achieving a comparable level of model accuracy and convergence speed compared to graph parallelism.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 19, 2023

Tutel: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts at Scale

Sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) has been widely adopted to scale deep learning models to trillion-plus parameters with fixed computational cost. The algorithmic performance of MoE relies on its token routing mechanism that forwards each input token to the right sub-models or experts. While token routing dynamically determines the amount of expert workload at runtime, existing systems suffer inefficient computation due to their static execution, namely static parallelism and pipelining, which does not adapt to the dynamic workload. We present Flex, a highly scalable stack design and implementation for MoE with dynamically adaptive parallelism and pipelining. Flex designs an identical layout for distributing MoE model parameters and input data, which can be leveraged by all possible parallelism or pipelining methods without any mathematical inequivalence or tensor migration overhead. This enables adaptive parallelism/pipelining optimization at zero cost during runtime. Based on this key design, Flex also implements various MoE acceleration techniques. Aggregating all techniques, Flex finally delivers huge speedup at any scale -- 4.96x and 5.75x speedup of a single MoE layer over 16 and 2,048 A100 GPUs, respectively, over the previous state-of-the-art. Our evaluation shows that Flex efficiently and effectively runs a real-world MoE-based model named SwinV2-MoE, built upon Swin Transformer V2, a state-of-the-art computer vision architecture. On efficiency, Flex accelerates SwinV2-MoE, achieving up to 1.55x and 2.11x speedup in training and inference over Fairseq, respectively. On effectiveness, the SwinV2-MoE model achieves superior accuracy in both pre-training and down-stream computer vision tasks such as COCO object detection than the counterpart dense model, indicating the readiness of Flex for end-to-end real-world model training and inference.

  • 15 authors
·
Jun 7, 2022

WarpCore: A Library for fast Hash Tables on GPUs

Hash tables are ubiquitous. Properties such as an amortized constant time complexity for insertion and querying as well as a compact memory layout make them versatile associative data structures with manifold applications. The rapidly growing amount of data emerging in many fields motivated the need for accelerated hash tables designed for modern parallel architectures. In this work, we exploit the fast memory interface of modern GPUs together with a parallel hashing scheme tailored to improve global memory access patterns, to design WarpCore -- a versatile library of hash table data structures. Unique device-sided operations allow for building high performance data processing pipelines entirely on the GPU. Our implementation achieves up to 1.6 billion inserts and up to 4.3 billion retrievals per second on a single GV100 GPU thereby outperforming the state-of-the-art solutions cuDPP, SlabHash, and NVIDIA RAPIDS cuDF. This performance advantage becomes even more pronounced for high load factors of over 90%. To overcome the memory limitation of a single GPU, we scale our approach over a dense NVLink topology which gives us close-to-optimal weak scaling on DGX servers. We further show how WarpCore can be used for accelerating a real world bioinformatics application (metagenomic classification) with speedups of over two orders-of-magnitude against state-of-the-art CPU-based solutions. WC is written in C++/CUDA-C and is openly available at https://github.com/sleeepyjack/warpcore.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 10, 2020

Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM

Large language models have led to state-of-the-art accuracies across a range of tasks. However, training these models efficiently is challenging for two reasons: a) GPU memory capacity is limited, making it impossible to fit large models on even a multi-GPU server, and b) the number of compute operations required to train these models can result in unrealistically long training times. Consequently, new methods of model parallelism such as tensor and pipeline parallelism have been proposed. Unfortunately, naive usage of these methods leads to fundamental scaling issues at thousands of GPUs, e.g., due to expensive cross-node communication or devices spending significant time waiting on other devices to make progress. In this paper, we show how different types of parallelism methods (tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism) can be composed to scale to thousands of GPUs and models with trillions of parameters. We survey techniques for pipeline parallelism and propose a novel interleaved pipeline parallelism schedule that can improve throughput by 10+% with memory footprint comparable to existing approaches. We quantitatively study the trade-offs between tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism, and provide intuition as to how to configure distributed training of a large model. Our approach allows us to perform training iterations on a model with 1 trillion parameters at 502 petaFLOP/s on 3072 GPUs with achieved per-GPU throughput of 52% of theoretical peak. Our code is open sourced at https://github.com/nvidia/megatron-lm.

  • 12 authors
·
Apr 9, 2021

GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism

Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructure. These solutions are often architecture-specific and do not transfer to other tasks. To address the need for efficient and task-independent model parallelism, we introduce GPipe, a pipeline parallelism library that allows scaling any network that can be expressed as a sequence of layers. By pipelining different sub-sequences of layers on separate accelerators, GPipe provides the flexibility of scaling a variety of different networks to gigantic sizes efficiently. Moreover, GPipe utilizes a novel batch-splitting pipelining algorithm, resulting in almost linear speedup when a model is partitioned across multiple accelerators. We demonstrate the advantages of GPipe by training large-scale neural networks on two different tasks with distinct network architectures: (i) Image Classification: We train a 557-million-parameter AmoebaNet model and attain a top-1 accuracy of 84.4% on ImageNet-2012, (ii) Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: We train a single 6-billion-parameter, 128-layer Transformer model on a corpus spanning over 100 languages and achieve better quality than all bilingual models.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 16, 2018

LASP-2: Rethinking Sequence Parallelism for Linear Attention and Its Hybrid

Linear sequence modeling approaches, such as linear attention, provide advantages like linear-time training and constant-memory inference over sequence lengths. However, existing sequence parallelism (SP) methods are either not optimized for the right-product-first feature of linear attention or use a ring-style communication strategy, which results in lower computation parallelism, limits their scalability for longer sequences in distributed systems. In this paper, we introduce LASP-2, a new SP method to enhance both communication and computation parallelism when training linear attention transformer models with very-long input sequences. Compared to previous work LASP, LASP-2 rethinks the minimal communication requirement for SP on linear attention layers, reorganizes the whole communication-computation workflow of LASP. In this way, only one single AllGather collective communication is needed on intermediate memory states, whose sizes are independent of the sequence length, leading to significant improvements of both communication and computation parallelism, as well as their overlap. Additionally, we extend LASP-2 to LASP-2H by applying similar communication redesign to standard attention modules, offering an efficient SP solution for hybrid models that blend linear and standard attention layers. Our evaluation on a Linear-Llama3 model, a variant of Llama3 with linear attention replacing standard attention, demonstrates the effectiveness of LASP-2 and LASP-2H. Specifically, LASP-2 achieves training speed improvements of 15.2% over LASP and 36.6% over Ring Attention, with a sequence length of 2048K across 64 GPUs. The Code is released as a part of: https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 11, 2025 2

NeuPIMs: NPU-PIM Heterogeneous Acceleration for Batched LLM Inferencing

Modern transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are constructed with a series of decoder blocks. Each block comprises three key components: (1) QKV generation, (2) multi-head attention, and (3) feed-forward networks. In batched processing, QKV generation and feed-forward networks involve compute-intensive matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMM), while multi-head attention requires bandwidth-heavy matrix-vector multiplications (GEMV). Machine learning accelerators like TPUs or NPUs are proficient in handling GEMM but are less efficient for GEMV computations. Conversely, Processing-in-Memory (PIM) technology is tailored for efficient GEMV computation, while it lacks the computational power to handle GEMM effectively. Inspired by this insight, we propose NeuPIMs, a heterogeneous acceleration system that jointly exploits a conventional GEMM-focused NPU and GEMV-optimized PIM devices. The main challenge in efficiently integrating NPU and PIM lies in enabling concurrent operations on both platforms, each addressing a specific kernel type. First, existing PIMs typically operate in a "blocked" mode, allowing only either NPU or PIM to be active at any given time. Second, the inherent dependencies between GEMM and GEMV in LLMs restrict their parallel processing. To tackle these challenges, NeuPIMs is equipped with dual row buffers in each bank, facilitating the simultaneous management of memory read/write operations and PIM commands. Further, NeuPIMs employs a runtime sub-batch interleaving technique to maximize concurrent execution, leveraging batch parallelism to allow two independent sub-batches to be pipelined within a single NeuPIMs device. Our evaluation demonstrates that compared to GPU-only, NPU-only, and a na\"ive NPU+PIM integrated acceleration approaches, NeuPIMs achieves 3times, 2.4times and 1.6times throughput improvement, respectively.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 1, 2024

Ladder-residual: parallelism-aware architecture for accelerating large model inference with communication overlapping

Large language model inference is both memory-intensive and time-consuming, often requiring distributed algorithms to efficiently scale. Various model parallelism strategies are used in multi-gpu training and inference to partition computation across multiple devices, reducing memory load and computation time. However, using model parallelism necessitates communication of information between GPUs, which has been a major bottleneck and limits the gains obtained by scaling up the number of devices. We introduce Ladder Residual, a simple architectural modification applicable to all residual-based models that enables straightforward overlapping that effectively hides the latency of communication. Our insight is that in addition to systems optimization, one can also redesign the model architecture to decouple communication from computation. While Ladder Residual can allow communication-computation decoupling in conventional parallelism patterns, we focus on Tensor Parallelism in this paper, which is particularly bottlenecked by its heavy communication. For a Transformer model with 70B parameters, applying Ladder Residual to all its layers can achieve 30% end-to-end wall clock speed up at inference time with TP sharding over 8 devices. We refer the resulting Transformer model as the Ladder Transformer. We train a 1B and 3B Ladder Transformer from scratch and observe comparable performance to a standard dense transformer baseline. We also show that it is possible to convert parts of the Llama-3.1 8B model to our Ladder Residual architecture with minimal accuracy degradation by only retraining for 3B tokens.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 11, 2025

TPI-LLM: Serving 70B-scale LLMs Efficiently on Low-resource Edge Devices

Large model inference is shifting from cloud to edge due to concerns about the privacy of user interaction data. However, edge devices often struggle with limited computing power, memory, and bandwidth, requiring collaboration across multiple devices to run and speed up LLM inference. Pipeline parallelism, the mainstream solution, is inefficient for single-user scenarios, while tensor parallelism struggles with frequent communications. In this paper, we argue that tensor parallelism can be more effective than pipeline on low-resource devices, and present a compute- and memory-efficient tensor parallel inference system, named TPI-LLM, to serve 70B-scale models. TPI-LLM keeps sensitive raw data local in the users' devices and introduces a sliding window memory scheduler to dynamically manage layer weights during inference, with disk I/O latency overlapped with the computation and communication. This allows larger models to run smoothly on memory-limited devices. We analyze the communication bottleneck and find that link latency, not bandwidth, emerges as the main issue, so a star-based allreduce algorithm is implemented. Through extensive experiments on both emulated and real testbeds, TPI-LLM demonstrated over 80% less time-to-first-token and token latency compared to Accelerate, and over 90% compared to Transformers and Galaxy, while cutting the peak memory footprint of Llama 2-70B by 90%, requiring only 3.1 GB of memory for 70B-scale models.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024 8

NanoFlow: Towards Optimal Large Language Model Serving Throughput

The increasing usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) has resulted in a surging demand for planet-scale serving systems, where tens of thousands of GPUs continuously serve hundreds of millions of users. Consequently, throughput (under reasonable latency constraints) has emerged as a key metric that determines serving systems' performance. To boost throughput, various methods of inter-device parallelism (e.g., data, tensor, pipeline) have been explored. However, existing methods do not consider overlapping the utilization of different resources within a single device, leading to underutilization and sub-optimal performance. We propose NanoFlow, a novel serving framework that exploits intra-device parallelism, which overlaps the usage of resources including compute, memory, and network within a single device through operation co-scheduling. To exploit intra-device parallelism, NanoFlow introduces two key innovations: First, NanoFlow splits requests into nano-batches at the granularity of operations, which breaks the dependency of sequential operations in LLM inference and enables overlapping; then, to get benefit from overlapping, NanoFlow uses an operation-level pipeline with execution unit scheduling, which partitions the device's functional units and simultaneously executes different operations in each unit. NanoFlow automates the pipeline setup using a parameter search algorithm, which enables easily porting NanoFlow to different models. We implement NanoFlow on NVIDIA GPUs and evaluate end-to-end serving throughput on several popular models such as LLaMA-2-70B, Mixtral 8x7B, LLaMA-3-8B, etc.. With practical workloads, NanoFlow provides 1.91x throughput boost compared to state-of-the-art serving systems achieving 59% to 72% of optimal throughput across ported models.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 22, 2024 2

SkipPipe: Partial and Reordered Pipelining Framework for Training LLMs in Heterogeneous Networks

Data and pipeline parallelism are ubiquitous for training of Large Language Models (LLM) on distributed nodes. Driven by the need for cost-effective training, recent work explores efficient communication arrangement for end to end training. Motivated by LLM's resistance to layer skipping and layer reordering, in this paper, we explore stage (several consecutive layers) skipping in pipeline training, and challenge the conventional practice of sequential pipeline execution. We derive convergence and throughput constraints (guidelines) for pipelining with skipping and swapping pipeline stages. Based on these constraints, we propose SkipPipe, the first partial pipeline framework to reduce the end-to-end training time for LLMs while preserving the convergence. The core of SkipPipe is a path scheduling algorithm that optimizes the paths for individual microbatches and reduces idle time (due to microbatch collisions) on the distributed nodes, complying with the given stage skipping ratio. We extensively evaluate SkipPipe on LLaMa models from 500M to 8B parameters on up to 20 nodes. Our results show that SkipPipe reduces training iteration time by up to 55% compared to full pipeline. Our partial pipeline training also improves resistance to layer omission during inference, experiencing a drop in perplexity of only 7% when running only half the model. Our code is available at https://github.com/gensyn-ai/skippipe.

Gensyn Gensyn
·
Feb 27, 2025

PIM-GPT: A Hybrid Process-in-Memory Accelerator for Autoregressive Transformers

Decoder-only Transformer models such as GPT have demonstrated superior performance in text generation, by autoregressively predicting the next token. However, the performance of GPT is bounded by low compute-to-memory-ratio and high memory access. Throughput-oriented architectures such as GPUs target parallel processing rather than sequential token generation, and are not efficient for GPT acceleration, particularly on-device inference applications. Process-in-memory (PIM) architectures can significantly reduce data movement and provide high computation parallelism, and are promising candidates to accelerate GPT inference. In this work, we propose PIM-GPT that aims to achieve high throughput, high energy efficiency and end-to-end acceleration of GPT inference. PIM-GPT leverages DRAM-based PIM solutions to perform multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations on the DRAM chips, greatly reducing data movement. A compact application-specific integrated chip (ASIC) is designed and synthesized to initiate instructions to PIM chips and support data communication along with necessary arithmetic computations. At the software level, the mapping scheme is designed to maximize data locality and computation parallelism by partitioning a matrix among DRAM channels and banks to utilize all in-bank computation resources concurrently. We develop an event-driven clock-cycle accurate simulator to validate the efficacy of the proposed PIM-GPT architecture. Overall, PIM-GPT achieves 41-137times, 631-1074times speedup and 339-1085times, 890-1632times energy efficiency over GPU and CPU baseline, respectively, on 8 GPT models with up to 1.4 billion parameters.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 13, 2023

Tawa: Automatic Warp Specialization for Modern GPUs with Asynchronous References

Modern GPUs feature specialized hardware units that enable high-performance, asynchronous dataflow execution. However, the conventional SIMT programming model is fundamentally misaligned with this task-parallel hardware, creating a significant programmability gap. While hardware-level warp specialization is the key to unlocking peak performance, it forces developers to manually orchestrate complex, low-level communication and software pipelines--a process that is labor-intensive, error-prone, and unsustainable. To address this challenge, we present Tawa, an automated compiler that systematically generates high-performance, warp-specialized code from a high-level, tile-based program. Central to our approach is a novel IR abstraction, asynchronous references (aref), which expresses warp-level communication without exposing low-level hardware details. Using this abstraction, Tawa automatically partitions programs into producer-consumer roles and manages the intricate dataflow pipeline, relieving developers of invasive kernel rewriting. Evaluation on NVIDIA H100 GPUs across representative LLM kernels shows that Tawa delivers high hardware utilization, achieving up to 1.1times speedup over highly optimized cuBLAS GEMM kernels. For attention workloads, Tawa attains 1.2times speedup over Triton and matches the performance of the hand-optimized CUTLASS C++ FlashAttention-3 kernel with far less programming effort.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

Boosting Large-scale Parallel Training Efficiency with C4: A Communication-Driven Approach

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has necessitated the adoption of parallel training techniques, involving the deployment of thousands of GPUs to train a single model. Unfortunately, we have found that the efficiency of current parallel training is often suboptimal, largely due to the following two main issues. Firstly, hardware failures are inevitable, leading to interruptions in the training tasks. The inability to quickly identify the faulty components results in a substantial waste of GPU resources. Secondly, since GPUs must wait for parameter synchronization to complete before proceeding to the next round of computation, network congestions can greatly increase the waiting time for GPUs. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a communication-driven solution, namely the C4. The key insights of C4 are two folds. First, in parallel training, collective communication exhibits periodic and homogeneous characteristics, so any anomalies are certainly due to some form of hardware malfunction. By leveraging this feature, C4 can rapidly identify the faulty components, swiftly isolate the anomaly, and restart the task, thereby avoiding resource wastage caused by delays in anomaly detection. Second, the predictable communication model of collective communication, involving few large flows, allows C4 to efficiently execute traffic planning, substantially reducing network congestion. C4 has been extensively implemented across our production systems, cutting error-induced overhead by roughly 30% and enhancing runtime performance by about 15% for certain applications with moderate communication costs.

  • 25 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

LoopMoE: Unifying Iterative Computation with Mixture-of-Experts for Language Modeling

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and looped architectures scale models along two orthogonal axes, namely parameter capacity and effective depth. However, mainstream looped architectures rely on dense backbones that couple parameter count with per-token FLOPs, which makes it impossible to isolate the effect of iterative computation under matched budgets. To this end, we present LoopMoE, a looped MoE language model that integrates sparse routing with iterative weight-shared computation through two designs. The first is IterAdaLN, which resolves weight-sharing symmetry via a modulation signal jointly conditioned on the iteration index and the per-token hidden state. The second is a capacity-balancing strategy that recovers the attention-to-FFN active parameter ratio of well-tuned non-looped references. Together, these designs enable the first strictly controlled, head-to-head evaluation of a looped MoE against a Vanilla MoE under identical total parameters, per-token FLOPs, and active sublayer ratios. At the 3B scale, LoopMoE outperforms the Vanilla MoE on 8 of 9 downstream benchmarks with an average improvement exceeding 1 point. At the 9B scale, LoopMoE continues to outperform the matched Vanilla MoE, indicating that the architectural gain persists at larger scale. Our work establishes a controlled synthesis of sparsity and recurrence, and suggests a promising direction for looped language models.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 2

TokenWeave: Efficient Compute-Communication Overlap for Distributed LLM Inference

Distributed inference of large language models (LLMs) can introduce overheads of up to 20% even over GPUs connected via high-speed interconnects such as NVLINK. Multiple techniques have been proposed to mitigate these overheads by decomposing computations into finer-grained tasks and overlapping communication with sub-tasks as they complete. However, fine-grained decomposition of a large computation into many smaller computations on GPUs results in overheads. Further, the communication itself uses many streaming multiprocessors (SMs), adding to the overhead. We present TokenWeave to address these challenges. TokenWeave proposes a Token-Splitting technique that divides the tokens in the inference batch into two approximately equal subsets in a wave-aware manner. The computation of one subset is then overlapped with the communication of the other. In addition, TokenWeave optimizes the order of the layer normalization computation with respect to communication operations and implements a novel fused AllReduce-RMSNorm kernel carefully leveraging Multimem instruction support available on NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. These optimizations allow TokenWeave to perform communication and RMSNorm using only 2-8 SMs. Moreover, our kernel enables the memory bound RMSNorm to be overlapped with the other batch's computation, providing additional gains. Our evaluations demonstrate up to 29% latency gains and up to 26% throughput gains across multiple models and workloads. In several settings, TokenWeave results in better performance compared to an equivalent model with all communication removed.

  • 3 authors
·
May 16, 2025

Zorse: Optimizing LLM Training Efficiency on Heterogeneous GPU Clusters

Large language models (LLMs) require vast amounts of GPU compute to train, but limited availability and high costs of GPUs make homogeneous clusters impractical for many organizations. Instead, assembling heterogeneous clusters by pooling together GPUs of different generations allows them to achieve higher aggregate compute and make use of all available GPUs. However, training on heterogeneous clusters presents several challenges, including load balancing across GPUs, optimizing memory usage to accommodate varying memory capacities, and ensuring communication-efficient training over diverse network interconnects potentially spanning multiple datacenters. In this paper, we make the case that efficient training on heterogeneous clusters requires (1) the integration of pipeline parallelism and data parallelism in a manner that is both communication- and memory-efficient, and (2) a more adaptable configuration of pipeline and data parallelism, which includes the capability to flexibly partition GPUs into asymmetric pipeline parallel stages and to incorporate heterogeneous GPUs within the same data parallelism group. We propose Zorse, the first system to unify all these capabilities while incorporating a planner that automatically configures training strategies for a given workload. Our evaluation shows that Zorse significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in heterogeneous training scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025

T3: Transparent Tracking & Triggering for Fine-grained Overlap of Compute & Collectives

Large Language Models increasingly rely on distributed techniques for their training and inference. These techniques require communication across devices which can reduce scaling efficiency as the number of devices increases. While some distributed techniques can overlap, and thus, hide this communication with independent computations, techniques such as Tensor Parallelism (TP) inherently serialize communication with model execution. One approach to hide this serialized communication is to interleave it with the producer operation (of the communicated data) in a fine-grained manner. However, this fine-grained interleaving of communication and computation in software can be difficult. Furthermore, as with any concurrent execution, it requires compute and memory resources to be shared between computation and communication, causing resource contention that reduces overlapping efficacy. To overcome these challenges, we propose T3 which applies hardware-software co-design to transparently overlap serialized communication while minimizing resource contention with compute. T3 transparently fuses producer operations with the subsequent communication via a simple configuration of the producer's output address space and requires minor software changes. At the hardware level, T3 adds a lightweight track and trigger mechanism to orchestrate the producer's compute, and communication. It further uses compute-enhanced memories for communication's attendant compute. As a result, T3 reduces resource contention, and efficiently overlaps serialized communication with computation. For important Transformer models like T-NLG, T3 speeds up communication-heavy sublayers by 30% geomean (max 47%) and reduces data movement by 22% geomean (max 36%). Furthermore, T3's benefits persist as models scale: geomean 29% for sublayers in sim500-billion parameter models, PALM and MT-NLG.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024 1

Speculative MoE: Communication Efficient Parallel MoE Inference with Speculative Token and Expert Pre-scheduling

MoE (Mixture of Experts) prevails as a neural architecture that can scale modern transformer-based LLMs (Large Language Models) to unprecedented scales. Nevertheless, large MoEs' great demands of computing power, memory capacity and memory bandwidth make scalable serving a fundamental challenge and efficient parallel inference has become a requisite to attain adequate throughput under latency constraints. DeepSpeed-MoE, one state-of-the-art MoE inference framework, adopts a 3D-parallel paradigm including EP (Expert Parallelism), TP (Tensor Parallel) and DP (Data Parallelism). However, our analysis shows DeepSpeed-MoE's inference efficiency is largely bottlenecked by EP, which is implemented with costly all-to-all collectives to route token activation. Our work aims to boost DeepSpeed-MoE by strategically reducing EP's communication overhead with a technique named Speculative MoE. Speculative MoE has two speculative parallelization schemes, speculative token shuffling and speculative expert grouping, which predict outstanding tokens' expert routing paths and pre-schedule tokens and experts across devices to losslessly trim EP's communication volume. Besides DeepSpeed-MoE, we also build Speculative MoE into a prevailing MoE inference engine SGLang. Experiments show Speculative MoE can significantly boost state-of-the-art MoE inference frameworks on fast homogeneous and slow heterogeneous interconnects.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025

Exploiting Inter-Layer Expert Affinity for Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Model Inference

In large language models like the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the Mixture of Experts paradigm has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing model expressiveness and accuracy. However, deploying GPT MoE models for parallel inference on distributed systems presents significant challenges, primarily due to the extensive Alltoall communication required for expert routing and aggregation. This communication bottleneck exacerbates the already complex computational landscape, hindering the efficient utilization of high-performance computing resources. In this paper, we propose a lightweight optimization technique called ExFlow, to largely accelerate the inference of these MoE models. We take a new perspective on alleviating the communication overhead by exploiting the inter-layer expert affinity. Unlike previous methods, our solution can be directly applied to pre-trained MoE models without any fine-tuning or accuracy degradation. By proposing a context-coherent expert parallelism on distributed systems, our design only uses one Alltoall communication to deliver the same functionality while previous methods all require two Alltoalls. By carefully examining the conditional probability in tokens' routing across multiple layers, we proved that pre-trained GPT MoE models implicitly exhibit a strong inter-layer expert affinity. We then design an efficient integer programming model to capture such features and show that by properly placing the experts on corresponding GPUs, we can reduce up to 67% cross-GPU routing latency. Our solution beats the cutting-edge MoE implementations with experts from 8 to 64, with up to 2.2x improvement in inference throughput. We further provide a detailed study of how the model implicitly acquires this expert affinity at the very early training stage and how this affinity evolves and stabilizes during training.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

Closing the Performance Gap with Modern C++

On the way to Exascale, programmers face the increasing challenge of having to support multiple hardware architectures from the same code base. At the same time, portability of code and performance are increasingly difficult to achieve as hardware architectures are becoming more and more diverse. Today's heterogeneous systems often include two or more completely distinct and incompatible hardware execution models, such as GPGPU's, SIMD vector units, and general purpose cores which conventionally have to be programmed using separate tool chains representing non-overlapping programming models. The recent revival of interest in the industry and the wider community for the C++ language has spurred a remarkable amount of standardization proposals and technical specifications in the arena of concurrency and parallelism. This recently includes an increasing amount of discussion around the need for a uniform, higher-level abstraction and programming model for parallelism in the C++ standard targeting heterogeneous and distributed computing. Such an abstraction should perfectly blend with existing, already standardized language and library features, but should also be generic enough to support future hardware developments. In this paper, we present the results from developing such a higher-level programming abstraction for parallelism in C++ which aims at enabling code and performance portability over a wide range of architectures and for various types of parallelism. We present and compare performance data obtained from running the well-known STREAM benchmark ported to our higher level C++ abstraction with the corresponding results from running it natively. We show that our abstractions enable performance at least as good as the comparable base-line benchmarks while providing a uniform programming API on all compared target architectures.

  • 5 authors
·
May 30, 2022

DEMON: Diffusion Engine for Musical Orchestrated Noise

We present DEMON, a real-time diffusion engine that makes the denoising process playable as a live musical instrument: a control surface both broad (many parameters shaped per-frame across the output) and responsive (each control taking effect as fast as its place in the denoising loop allows). Built on ACE-Step 1.5 and StreamDiffusion's ring-buffer architecture with TensorRT acceleration, it sustains up to 12.3 decoder completions per second for 60-second music on a single consumer GPU (RTX 5090), or 11.3 generations per second at our production ring-depth of 4. At these rates denoising parameters become viable as live performance controls, but the ring buffer propagates per-request changes only at its drain rate, a floor of S denoising steps. We contribute four mechanisms. (1) Per-slot heterogeneous denoise scheduling: each ring-buffer slot owns its timestep schedule, so a moving denoise slider is tracked without wiping the in-flight queue, where the upstream global-schedule design must rebuild and discard it. (2) Shared mutable per-step state, giving any parameter consulted at every solver step next-tick effect, bypassing ring-buffer drain. (3) Per-frame source blending: a sampling-time control on the standard SDE re-noise step, giving a framewise transformation-strength axis that complements scalar denoise scheduling. (4) Windowed VAE decode exploiting receptive-field analysis for an 8.0x decode speedup. Together these separate streaming-diffusion parameters into four propagation classes, by onset and convergence latency.

daydreamlive Daydream
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May 26 2

Breaking the Bubble: Asynchronous Pipeline Parallel Training with Bounded Weight Inconsistency

Pipeline parallelism is essential for training large neural networks, but existing schedules trade off throughput, memory, and optimization consistency. Synchronous pipelines preserve forward/backward weight consistency but suffer from bubbles; asynchronous pipelines remove bubbles but introduce weight-version mismatch, typically requiring weight stashing, prediction, or correction mechanisms. We introduce PACI (Pipeline Asynchronous training with Controlled Inconsistency), a bubble-free asynchronous pipeline method that bounds forward/backward version drift without weight stashing, prediction, additional parameter copies, or global synchronization. The key idea is to use local gradient accumulation as a version-control mechanism: by slowing parameter-version evolution relative to pipeline delay, PACI limits the number of optimizer updates crossed by any micro-batch while preserving steady-state utilization. In GPT-style language-model pretraining, PACI matches the stability and final perplexity of synchronous 1F1B-flush, retains the same peak memory footprint, achieves fully utilized pipeline throughput, and improves training time-to-accuracy by up to 1.69times over the fastest flush baseline. These results show that forward/backward inconsistency need not be eliminated: when explicitly bounded, it can be safely traded for substantial efficiency gains.

Shift Parallelism: Low-Latency, High-Throughput LLM Inference for Dynamic Workloads

Efficient parallelism is necessary for achieving low-latency, high-throughput inference with large language models (LLMs). Tensor parallelism (TP) is the state-of-the-art method for reducing LLM response latency, however GPU communications reduces combined token throughput. On the other hand, data parallelism (DP) obtains a higher throughput yet is slow in response latency. Best of both worlds does not exist, and it is not possible to combine TP and DP because of the KV cache variance across the parallelisms. We notice Sequence Parallelism (SP - Ulysses in training) has similar properties as DP but with KV cache invariance. We adapt SP to inference, and combine it with TP to get the best of both worlds. Our solution: Shift Parallelism. Shift Parallelism dynamically switches across TP and SP, and minimizes latency in low traffic without losing throughput in high traffic. The efficient GPU communications of Shift Parallelism yields up to i) 1.51x faster response in interactive workloads and ii) 50% higher throughput in batch workloads, compared to a TP-only solution. We evaluate Shift Parallelism with real-world production traces with dynamic traffic patterns as well as synthetic benchmarking patterns across models, context sizes, and arrival rates. All results affirm the same: Shift Parallelism has a better the latency vs. throughput tradeoff than TP or DP, and hence obtains low latency without degrading throughput in dynamic workloads.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 25

Hogwild! Inference: Parallel LLM Generation via Concurrent Attention

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to tackle increasingly complex tasks through advanced reasoning, long-form content generation, and tool use. Solving these tasks often involves long inference-time computations. In human problem solving, a common strategy to expedite work is collaboration: by dividing the problem into sub-tasks, exploring different strategies concurrently, etc. Recent research has shown that LLMs can also operate in parallel by implementing explicit cooperation frameworks, such as voting mechanisms or the explicit creation of independent sub-tasks that can be executed in parallel. However, each of these frameworks may not be suitable for all types of tasks, which can hinder their applicability. In this work, we propose a different design approach: we run LLM "workers" in parallel , allowing them to synchronize via a concurrently-updated attention cache and prompt these workers to decide how best to collaborate. Our approach allows the instances to come up with their own collaboration strategy for the problem at hand, all the while "seeing" each other's partial progress in the concurrent cache. We implement this approach via Hogwild! Inference: a parallel LLM inference engine where multiple instances of the same LLM run in parallel with the same attention cache, with "instant" access to each other's generated tokens. Hogwild! inference takes advantage of Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) to avoid recomputation while improving parallel hardware utilization. We find that modern reasoning-capable LLMs can perform inference with shared Key-Value cache out of the box, without additional fine-tuning.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 8, 2025 6

Balancing Pipeline Parallelism with Vocabulary Parallelism

Pipeline parallelism is widely used to scale the training of transformer-based large language models, various works have been done to improve its throughput and memory footprint. In this paper, we address a frequently overlooked issue: the vocabulary layers can cause imbalanced computation and memory usage across pipeline stages, worsening pipeline bubbles and the memory bottleneck. To tackle this, we partition the vocabulary layers evenly across pipeline devices and group the computation into pipeline passes. To reduce the activation memory overhead, we propose several algorithms to reduce communication barriers within vocabulary layers. Additionally, we utilize a generalizable method to integrate Vocabulary Parallelism with existing pipeline schedules. By combining these techniques, our methods effectively balance the computation and parameter memory, with only a small constant activation memory overhead. Notably, when combined with activation memory-balanced schedules like V-Half, our approach achieves perfect balance in both memory and computation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves computation and memory balance regardless of the vocabulary size, resulting in a 5% to 51% improvement in throughput compared to naive approaches, meanwhile significantly reducing peak memory usage especially for large vocabulary scenarios. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/sail-sg/VocabularyParallelism .

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 3

Prime Collective Communications Library -- Technical Report

This report presents the Prime Collective Communications Library (PCCL), a novel fault-tolerant collective communication library designed for distributed ML workloads over the public internet. PCCL introduces a new programming model that enables dynamic peer joining and failure recovery. The library implements efficient collective operations like all-reduce while providing robust fault tolerance mechanisms that allow the system to continue operating even when peers fail or join during ongoing operations. We demonstrate that PCCL's design enables practical solutions to dynamic membership challenges in workloads with repeated operations and deterministic state advancement. Our implementation passes extensive stress tests across all major operating systems, showing reliable operation even under rapid peer churn and concurrent collective operations. By dispatching to multiple connections, we can efficiently utilize cross-continental long-fat-pipe TCP WAN links, in our experiments achieving up to 45 Gbit/s of bandwidth utilization across Europe and 25 Gbit/s across North America and Europe. PCCL's architecture enables easy implementation of distributed low-communication optimization strategies like DiLoCo, which significantly reduce communication frequency. Combined with quantization, this leads to a significant reduction in the bandwidth required for distributed training workloads. PCCL also allows for concurrent collective operations, which enables optimization strategies like async DiLoCo, which can completely hide communication overhead by implementing one-step delayed parameter updates. PCCL can facilitate exact bit-parity of the shared state across peers in all cases induced by graceful or abrupt peer churn. While PCCL exposes a C99 API, Python bindings are available which are compatible with PyTorch alongside FSDP. PCCL is available under the open source MIT license.

  • 5 authors
·
May 20, 2025

LOOPer: A Learned Automatic Code Optimizer For Polyhedral Compilers

While polyhedral compilers have shown success in implementing advanced code transformations, they still face challenges in selecting the ones that lead to the most profitable speedups. This has motivated the use of machine learning based cost models to guide the search for polyhedral optimizations. State-of-the-art polyhedral compilers have demonstrated a viable proof-of-concept of such an approach. While promising, this approach still faces significant limitations. State-of-the-art polyhedral compilers that use a deep learning cost model only support a small subset of affine transformations, limiting their ability to explore complex code transformations. Furthermore, their applicability does not scale beyond simple programs, thus excluding many program classes from their scope, such as those with non-rectangular iteration domains or multiple loop nests. These limitations significantly impact the generality of such compilers and autoschedulers and put into question the whole approach. In this paper, we introduce LOOPer, the first polyhedral autoscheduler that uses a deep learning based cost model and covers a large space of affine transformations and programs. LOOPer allows the optimization of an extensive set of programs while being effective at applying complex sequences of polyhedral transformations. We implement and evaluate LOOPer and show that it achieves competitive speedups over the state-of-the-art. On the PolyBench benchmarks, LOOPer achieves a geometric mean speedup of 1.84x over Tiramisu and 1.42x over Pluto, two state-of-the-art polyhedral autoschedulers.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

Exploring the Performance Improvement of Tensor Processing Engines through Transformation in the Bit-weight Dimension of MACs

General matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) is a cornerstone of AI computations, making tensor processing engines (TPEs) increasingly critical in GPUs and domain-specific architectures. Existing architectures primarily optimize dataflow or operand reuse strategies. However, considering the interaction between matrix multiplication and multiply-accumulators (MACs) offers greater optimization potential. This work introduces a novel hardware perspective on matrix multiplication, focusing on the bit-weight dimension of MACs. We propose a finer-grained TPE notation using matrix triple loops as an example, introducing new methods for designing and optimizing PE microarchitectures. Based on this notation and its transformations, we propose four optimization techniques that improve timing, area, and power consumption. Implementing our design in RTL using the SMIC-28nm process, we evaluate its effectiveness across four classic TPE architectures: systolic array, 3D-Cube, multiplier-adder tree, and 2D-Matrix. Our techniques achieve area efficiency improvements of 1.27x, 1.28x, 1.56x, and 1.44x, and energy efficiency gains of 1.04x, 1.56x, 1.49x, and 1.20x, respectively. Applied to a bit-slice architecture, our approach achieves a 12.10x improvement in energy efficiency and 2.85x in area efficiency compared to Laconic. Our Verilog HDL code, along with timing, area, and power reports, is available at https://github.com/wqzustc/High-Performance-Tensor-Processing-Engines

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

EnergonAI: An Inference System for 10-100 Billion Parameter Transformer Models

Large transformer models display promising performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Although the AI community has expanded the model scale to the trillion parameter level, the practical deployment of 10-100 billion parameter models is still uncertain due to the latency, throughput, and memory constraints. In this paper, we proposed EnergonAI to solve the challenges of the efficient deployment of 10-100 billion parameter transformer models on single- or multi-GPU systems. EnergonAI adopts a hierarchy-controller system architecture to coordinate multiple devices and efficiently support different parallel patterns. It delegates the execution of sub-models to multiple workers in the single-controller style and applies tensor parallelism and pipeline parallelism among the workers in a multi-controller style. Upon the novel architecture, we propose three techniques, i.e. non-blocking pipeline parallelism, distributed redundant computation elimination, and peer memory pooling. EnergonAI enables the users to program complex parallel code the same as a serial one. Compared with the FasterTransformer, we have proven that EnergonAI has superior performance on latency and throughput. In our experiments, EnergonAI can achieve 37% latency reduction in tensor parallelism, 10% scalability improvement in pipeline parallelism, and it improves the model scale inferred on a single GPU by using a larger heterogeneous memory space at cost of limited performance reduction.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 6, 2022

DistZO2: High-Throughput and Memory-Efficient Zeroth-Order Fine-tuning LLMs with Distributed Parallel Computing

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) remains resource-intensive due to their sheer scale. While zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a memory-efficient alternative by eliminating backward passes, its application to multi-hundred-billion-parameter models is constrained by GPU memory and compute throughput. The ZO2 framework addresses the memory bottleneck by offloading model parameters to CPU memory and overlapping transformer block transfer with dual forward computation on a single GPU. However, ZO2 remains limited by its single-device execution and achieves modest throughput. In this work, we present DistZO2, a high-throughput, memory-efficient framework for distributed zeroth-order fine-tuning of LLMs. DistZO2 introduces three parallel strategies: (1) Perturbation Parallelism (PertP), which parallelizes the two perturbed forward passes across devices; (2) Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP), adapted to the scalar-gradient nature of ZO training; and (3) a unified 2D Parallelism design that combines PertP and DDP. To further mitigate communication bottlenecks introduced by parameter offloading, we propose a hardware-aware communication strategy that slices parameter blocks and redistributes them across GPUs via high-speed interconnects such as NVLink. DistZO2 scales zeroth-order fine-tuning to modern multi-GPU systems, preserving ZO2's memory efficiency while substantially improving training throughput. In our experiments on OPT-175B, DistZO2 achieves a 3x speedup over ZO2 with distributed computing. DistZO2's code has been open-sourced in https://github.com/liangyuwang/zo2.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025

ParEVO: Synthesizing Code for Irregular Data: High-Performance Parallelism through Agentic Evolution

The transition from sequential to parallel computing is essential for modern high-performance applications but is hindered by the steep learning curve of concurrent programming. This challenge is magnified for irregular data structures (such as sparse graphs, unbalanced trees, and non-uniform meshes) where static scheduling fails and data dependencies are unpredictable. Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail catastrophically on these tasks, generating code plagued by subtle race conditions, deadlocks, and sub-optimal scaling. We bridge this gap with ParEVO, a framework designed to synthesize high-performance parallel algorithms for irregular data. Our contributions include: (1) The Parlay-Instruct Corpus, a curated dataset of 13,820 tasks synthesized via a "Critic-Refine" pipeline that explicitly filters for empirically performant algorithms that effectively utilize Work-Span parallel primitives; (2) specialized DeepSeek, Qwen, and Gemini models fine-tuned to align probabilistic generation with the rigorous semantics of the ParlayLib library; and (3) an Evolutionary Coding Agent (ECA) that improves the "last mile" of correctness by iteratively repairing code using feedback from compilers, dynamic race detectors, and performance profilers. On the ParEval benchmark, ParEVO achieves an average 106x speedup (with a maximum of 1103x) across the suite, and a robust 13.6x speedup specifically on complex irregular graph problems, outperforming state-of-the-art commercial models. Furthermore, our evolutionary approach matches state-of-the-art expert human baselines, achieving up to a 4.1x speedup on specific highly-irregular kernels. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/WildAlg/ParEVO.

AsyncFlow: An Asynchronous Streaming RL Framework for Efficient LLM Post-Training

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a pivotal technology in the post-training phase of large language models (LLMs). Traditional task-colocated RL frameworks suffer from significant scalability bottlenecks, while task-separated RL frameworks face challenges in complex dataflows and the corresponding resource idling and workload imbalance. Moreover, most existing frameworks are tightly coupled with LLM training or inference engines, making it difficult to support custom-designed engines. To address these challenges, we propose AsyncFlow, an asynchronous streaming RL framework for efficient post-training. Specifically, we introduce a distributed data storage and transfer module that provides a unified data management and fine-grained scheduling capability in a fully streamed manner. This architecture inherently facilitates automated pipeline overlapping among RL tasks and dynamic load balancing. Moreover, we propose a producer-consumer-based asynchronous workflow engineered to minimize computational idleness by strategically deferring parameter update process within staleness thresholds. Finally, the core capability of AsynFlow is architecturally decoupled from underlying training and inference engines and encapsulated by service-oriented user interfaces, offering a modular and customizable user experience. Extensive experiments demonstrate an average of 1.59 throughput improvement compared with state-of-the-art baseline. The presented architecture in this work provides actionable insights for next-generation RL training system designs.

  • 19 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025 1

Flover: A Temporal Fusion Framework for Efficient Autoregressive Model Parallel Inference

Autoregressive models, despite their commendable performance in a myriad of generative tasks, face challenges stemming from their inherently sequential structure. Inference on these models, by design, harnesses a temporal dependency, where the current token's probability distribution is conditioned on preceding tokens. This inherent characteristic severely impedes computational efficiency during inference as a typical inference request can require more than thousands of tokens, where generating each token requires a load of entire model weights, making the inference more memory-bound. The large overhead becomes profound in real deployment where requests arrive randomly, necessitating various generation lengths. Existing solutions, such as dynamic batching and concurrent instances, introduce significant response delays and bandwidth contention, falling short of achieving optimal latency and throughput. To address these shortcomings, we propose Flover -- a temporal fusion framework for efficiently inferring multiple requests in parallel. We deconstruct the general generation pipeline into pre-processing and token generation, and equip the framework with a dedicated work scheduler for fusing the generation process temporally across all requests. By orchestrating the token-level parallelism, Flover exhibits optimal hardware efficiency and significantly spares the system resources. By further employing a fast buffer reordering algorithm that allows memory eviction of finished tasks, it brings over 11x inference speedup on GPT and 16x on LLAMA compared to the cutting-edge solutions provided by NVIDIA FasterTransformer. Crucially, by leveraging the advanced tensor parallel technique, Flover proves efficacious across diverse computational landscapes, from single-GPU setups to distributed scenarios, thereby offering robust performance optimization that adapts to variable use cases.

  • 7 authors
·
May 22, 2023

Nexus:Proactive Intra-GPU Disaggregation of Prefill and Decode in LLM Serving

Monolithic serving with chunked prefill improves GPU utilization by batching prefill and decode together, but suffers from fine-grained phase interference. Engine-level prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation avoids interference but incurs higher hardware and coordination overhead. Prior intra-GPU disaggregation approaches multiplex prefill and decode within a single GPU, using SLO-based tuning guided by heuristics from offline profiling or reactive feedback loops. However, these methods respond reactively to performance issues rather than anticipating them, limiting adaptability under dynamic workloads. We ask: can we achieve proactive intra-GPU disaggregation that adapts effectively to dynamic workloads? The key challenge lies in managing the conflicting resource demands of prefill and decode under varying conditions. We first show that GPU resources exhibit diminishing returns -- beyond a saturation point, more allocation yields minimal latency benefit. Second, we observe that memory bandwidth contention becomes a critical bottleneck. These insights motivate a design that dynamically partitions GPU resources across prefill and decode phases, while jointly considering compute capacity, memory footprint, and bandwidth contention. Evaluated on diverse LLMs and workloads, our system Nexus achieves up to 2.2x higher throughput, 20x lower TTFT, and 2.5x lower TBT than vLLM; outperforms SGLang by up to 2x; and matches or exceeds disaggregated vLLM.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 9, 2025

DeepSpeed Ulysses: System Optimizations for Enabling Training of Extreme Long Sequence Transformer Models

Computation in a typical Transformer-based large language model (LLM) can be characterized by batch size, hidden dimension, number of layers, and sequence length. Until now, system works for accelerating LLM training have focused on the first three dimensions: data parallelism for batch size, tensor parallelism for hidden size and pipeline parallelism for model depth or layers. These widely studied forms of parallelism are not targeted or optimized for long sequence Transformer models. Given practical application needs for long sequence LLM, renewed attentions are being drawn to sequence parallelism. However, existing works in sequence parallelism are constrained by memory-communication inefficiency, limiting their scalability to long sequence large models. In this work, we introduce DeepSpeed-Ulysses, a novel, portable and effective methodology for enabling highly efficient and scalable LLM training with extremely long sequence length. DeepSpeed-Ulysses at its core partitions input data along the sequence dimension and employs an efficient all-to-all collective communication for attention computation. Theoretical communication analysis shows that whereas other methods incur communication overhead as sequence length increases, DeepSpeed-Ulysses maintains constant communication volume when sequence length and compute devices are increased proportionally. Furthermore, experimental evaluations show that DeepSpeed-Ulysses trains 2.5X faster with 4X longer sequence length than the existing method SOTA baseline.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 25, 2023 1

Parallel Paradigms in Modern HPC: A Comparative Analysis of MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA

This paper presents a comprehensive comparison of three dominant parallel programming models in High Performance Computing (HPC): Message Passing Interface (MPI), Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP), and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Selecting optimal programming approaches for modern heterogeneous HPC architectures has become increasingly critical. We systematically analyze these models across multiple dimensions: architectural foundations, performance characteristics, domain-specific suitability, programming complexity, and recent advancements. We examine each model's strengths, weaknesses, and optimization techniques. Our investigation demonstrates that MPI excels in distributed memory environments with near-linear scalability for communication-intensive applications, but faces communication overhead challenges. OpenMP provides strong performance and usability in shared-memory systems and loop-centric tasks, though it is limited by shared memory contention. CUDA offers substantial performance gains for data-parallel GPU workloads, but is restricted to NVIDIA GPUs and requires specialized expertise. Performance evaluations across scientific simulations, machine learning, and data analytics reveal that hybrid approaches combining two or more models often yield optimal results in heterogeneous environments. The paper also discusses implementation challenges, optimization best practices, and emerging trends such as performance portability frameworks, task-based programming, and the convergence of HPC and Big Data. This research helps developers and researchers make informed decisions when selecting programming models for modern HPC applications, emphasizing that the best choice depends on application requirements, hardware, and development constraints.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025

Sequential Gradient Coding For Straggler Mitigation

In distributed computing, slower nodes (stragglers) usually become a bottleneck. Gradient Coding (GC), introduced by Tandon et al., is an efficient technique that uses principles of error-correcting codes to distribute gradient computation in the presence of stragglers. In this paper, we consider the distributed computation of a sequence of gradients {g(1),g(2),ldots,g(J)}, where processing of each gradient g(t) starts in round-t and finishes by round-(t+T). Here Tgeq 0 denotes a delay parameter. For the GC scheme, coding is only across computing nodes and this results in a solution where T=0. On the other hand, having T>0 allows for designing schemes which exploit the temporal dimension as well. In this work, we propose two schemes that demonstrate improved performance compared to GC. Our first scheme combines GC with selective repetition of previously unfinished tasks and achieves improved straggler mitigation. In our second scheme, which constitutes our main contribution, we apply GC to a subset of the tasks and repetition for the remainder of the tasks. We then multiplex these two classes of tasks across workers and rounds in an adaptive manner, based on past straggler patterns. Using theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that our second scheme achieves significant reduction in the computational load. In our experiments, we study a practical setting of concurrently training multiple neural networks over an AWS Lambda cluster involving 256 worker nodes, where our framework naturally applies. We demonstrate that the latter scheme can yield a 16\% improvement in runtime over the baseline GC scheme, in the presence of naturally occurring, non-simulated stragglers.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 24, 2022

FSMoE: A Flexible and Scalable Training System for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Models

Recent large language models (LLMs) have tended to leverage sparsity to reduce computations, employing the sparsely activated mixture-of-experts (MoE) technique. MoE introduces four modules, including token routing, token communication, expert computation, and expert parallelism, that impact model quality and training efficiency. To enable versatile usage of MoE models, we introduce FSMoE, a flexible training system optimizing task scheduling with three novel techniques: 1) Unified abstraction and online profiling of MoE modules for task scheduling across various MoE implementations. 2) Co-scheduling intra-node and inter-node communications with computations to minimize communication overheads. 3) To support near-optimal task scheduling, we design an adaptive gradient partitioning method for gradient aggregation and a schedule to adaptively pipeline communications and computations. We conduct extensive experiments with configured MoE layers and real-world MoE models on two GPU clusters. Experimental results show that 1) our FSMoE supports four popular types of MoE routing functions and is more efficient than existing implementations (with up to a 1.42times speedup), and 2) FSMoE outperforms the state-of-the-art MoE training systems (DeepSpeed-MoE and Tutel) by 1.18times-1.22times on 1458 MoE layers and 1.19times-3.01times on real-world MoE models based on GPT-2 and Mixtral using a popular routing function.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 18, 2025

TEMPI: An Interposed MPI Library with a Canonical Representation of CUDA-aware Datatypes

MPI derived datatypes are an abstraction that simplifies handling of non-contiguous data in MPI applications. These datatypes are recursively constructed at runtime from primitive Named Types defined in the MPI standard. More recently, the development and deployment of CUDA-aware MPI implementations has encouraged the transition of distributed high-performance MPI codes to use GPUs. Such implementations allow MPI functions to directly operate on GPU buffers, easing integration of GPU compute into MPI codes. This work first presents a novel datatype handling strategy for nested strided datatypes, which finds a middle ground between the specialized or generic handling in prior work. This work also shows that the performance characteristics of non-contiguous data handling can be modeled with empirical system measurements, and used to transparently improve MPI_Send/Recv latency. Finally, despite substantial attention to non-contiguous GPU data and CUDA-aware MPI implementations, good performance cannot be taken for granted. This work demonstrates its contributions through an MPI interposer library, TEMPI. TEMPI can be used with existing MPI deployments without system or application changes. Ultimately, the interposed-library model of this work demonstrates MPI_Pack speedup of up to 242000x and MPI_Send speedup of up to 59000x compared to the MPI implementation deployed on a leadership-class supercomputer. This yields speedup of more than 917x in a 3D halo exchange with 3072 processes.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 28, 2020

TNT: Improving Chunkwise Training for Test-Time Memorization

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with deep test-time memorization modules, such as Titans and TTT, represent a promising, linearly-scaling paradigm distinct from Transformers. While these expressive models do not yet match the peak performance of state-of-the-art Transformers, their potential has been largely untapped due to prohibitively slow training and low hardware utilization. Existing parallelization methods force a fundamental conflict governed by the chunksize hyperparameter: large chunks boost speed but degrade performance, necessitating a fixed, suboptimal compromise. To solve this challenge, we introduce TNT, a novel training paradigm that decouples training efficiency from inference performance through a two-stage process. Stage one is an efficiency-focused pre-training phase utilizing a hierarchical memory. A global module processes large, hardware-friendly chunks for long-range context, while multiple parallel local modules handle fine-grained details. Crucially, by periodically resetting local memory states, we break sequential dependencies to enable massive context parallelization. Stage two is a brief fine-tuning phase where only the local memory modules are adapted to a smaller, high-resolution chunksize, maximizing accuracy with minimal overhead. Evaluated on Titans and TTT models, TNT achieves a substantial acceleration in training speed-up to 17 times faster than the most accurate baseline configuration - while simultaneously improving model accuracy. This improvement removes a critical scalability barrier, establishing a practical foundation for developing expressive RNNs and facilitating future work to close the performance gap with Transformers.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 9, 2025

Scaling Large Language Model Training on Frontier with Low-Bandwidth Partitioning

Scaling up Large Language Model(LLM) training involves fitting a tremendous amount of training parameters across a limited number of workers. However, methods like ZeRO-3 that drastically reduce GPU memory pressure often incur heavy communication to ensure global synchronization and consistency. Established efforts such as ZeRO++ use secondary partitions to avoid inter-node communications, given that intra-node GPU-GPU transfer generally has more bandwidth and lower latency than inter-node connections. However, as more capable infrastructure like Frontier, equipped with AMD GPUs, emerged with impressive computing capability, there is a need for investigations on the hardware topology and to develop targeted strategies to improve training efficiency. In this work, we propose a collection of communication and optimization strategies for ZeRO++ to reduce communication costs and improve memory utilization. In this paper, we propose a 3-level hierarchical partitioning specifically for the current Top-1 supercomputing cluster, Frontier, which aims at leveraging various bandwidths across layers of communications (GCD-GCD, GPU-GPU, and inter-node) to reduce communication overhead. For a 20B GPT model, we observe a 1.71x increase in TFLOPS per GPU when compared with ZeRO++ up to 384 GCDs and a scaling efficiency of 0.94 for up to 384 GCDs. To the best of our knowledge, our work is also the first effort to efficiently optimize LLM workloads on Frontier AMD GPUs.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 7, 2025

Parcae: Scaling Laws For Stable Looped Language Models

Traditional fixed-depth architectures scale quality by increasing training FLOPs, typically through increased parameterization, at the expense of a higher memory footprint, or data. A potential alternative is looped architectures, which instead increase FLOPs by sending activations through a block of layers in a loop. While promising, existing recipes for training looped architectures can be unstable, suffering from residual explosion and loss spikes. We address these challenges by recasting looping as a nonlinear time-variant dynamical system over the residual stream. Via a linear approximation to this system, we find that instability occurs in existing looped architectures as a result of large spectral norms in their injection parameters. To address these instability issues, we propose Parcae, a novel stable, looped architecture that constrains the spectral norm of the injection parameters via discretization of a negative diagonal parameterization. As a result, Parcae achieves up to 6.3% lower validation perplexity over prior large-scale looped models. Using our stable looped architecture, we investigate the scaling properties of looping as a medium to improve quality by increasing FLOPs in training and test-time. For training, we derive predictable power laws to scale FLOPs while keeping parameter count fixed. Our initial scaling laws suggest that looping and data should be increased in tandem, given a fixed FLOP budget. At test-time, we find that Parcae can use looping to scale compute, following a predictable, saturating exponential decay. When scaled up to 1.3B parameters, we find that Parcae improves CORE and Core-Extended quality by 2.99 and 1.18 points when compared to strong Transformer baselines under a fixed parameter and data budget, achieving a relative quality of up to 87.5% a Transformer twice the size.