Cited by 648Parallel Computing and Optimization TechniquesTopic ModelingNatural Language Processing Techniques

Efficient large-scale language model training on GPU clusters using megatron-LM

Open access
Narayanan, Deepak, Shoeybi, Mohammad, Casper, Jared, LeGresley, Patrick, Patwary, Mostofa, Korthikanti, Vijay, Vainbrand, Dmitri, Kashinkunti, Prethvi +4 more·2021·Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

Abstract

Large language models have led to state-of-the-art accuracies across several tasks. However, training these models efficiently is challenging because: 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 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 scaling issues at thousands of GPUs. In this paper, we show how tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism can be composed to scale to thousands of GPUs. We propose a novel interleaved pipelining schedule that can improve throughput by 10+% with memory footprint comparable to existing approaches. Our approach allows us to perform training iterations on a model with 1 trillion parameters at 502 petaFLOP/s on 3072 GPUs (per-GPU throughput of 52% of theoretical peak).

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3458817.3476209

Cites

32 of 32 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Current pipeline parallelism implementations have constraints on supported batch size per GPU, requiring it to be divisible by the number of pipeline stages.

    “Current implementations have constraints on supported batch size per GPU, requiring it to be divisible by the number of pipeline stages.”

    From The Llama 3 Herd of Models (2024) · cites this paper as Narayanan et al., 2021

    Section 2.2.2 (page not available) says the paper’s interleaved schedule requires the number of microbatches in a batch to be a multiple of the number of devices in the pipeline. It does not state that batch size per GPU must be divisible by the number of pipeline stages for pipeline-parallel implementations generally; the stated requirement applies to this particular schedule and to microbatch count. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

7 of the 39 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Shiqing Fan, Yi Rong, Chen Meng, Zongyan Cao, Siyu Wang, Zhen Zheng, Chuan Wu, Guoping Long, Jun Yang, Lixue Xia, et al. DAPPLE: A Pipelined Data Parallel Approach for Training Large Models. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, pages 431-445, 2021.
  2. Andreas Griewank and Andrea Walther. Revolve: An Implementation of Check- pointing for the Reverse or Adjoint Mode of Computational Differentiation. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS), 26(1):19-45, 2000.
  3. Paras Jain, Ajay Jain, Aniruddha Nrusimha, Amir Gholami, Pieter Abbeel, Joseph Gonzalez, Kurt Keutzer, and Ion Stoica. Breaking the Memory Wall with Optimal Tensor Rematerialization. In Proceedings of Machine Learning and Systems 2020, pages 497-511. 2020.
  4. Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners. OpenAI Blog, 1(8):9, 2019.
  5. Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, and Peter J. Liu. Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer. arXiv:1910.10683, 2019. · arXiv
  6. Yuanzhong Xu, HyoukJoong Lee, Dehao Chen, Hongjun Choi, Blake Hechtman, and Shibo Wang. Automatic Cross-Replica Sharding of Weight Updates in Data- Parallel Training. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.13336, 2020. · arXiv
  7. Yang You, Zhao Zhang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, James Demmel, and Kurt Keutzer. Ima- geNet Training in Minutes. In Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Parallel Processing, pages 1-10, 2018.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Narayanan, D., Shoeybi, M., Casper, J., LeGresley, P., Patwary, M., Korthikanti, V., Vainbrand, D., Kashinkunti, P., Bernauer, J., Catanzaro, B., Phanishayee, A., & Zaharia, M.
Affiliations
  • NVIDIA and Microsoft Research
  • Nvidia (United Kingdom) (GB)
  • Microsoft (United States) (US)
  • Stanford University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
Publisher
ACM
Published
2021-11-13
Pages
1-15
ISSN
2167-4337 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3187255235
Cited by
639
References
39
Citations by year
2026: 151 · 2025: 211 · 2024: 152 · 2023: 90 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 2
FWCI
50.34
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
National Science Foundation (DGE-165651 8, 1651570, 1656518, CAREER)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
large language model training, GPU clusters, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, data parallelism, memory efficiency, training throughput

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review