skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: TeraPipe: Token-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Training Large-Scale Language Models
Model parallelism has become a necessity for training modern large-scale deep language models. In this work, we identify a new and orthogonal dimension from existing model parallel approaches: it is possible to perform pipeline parallelism within a single training sequence for Transformer-based language models thanks to its autoregressive property. This enables a more fine-grained pipeline compared with previous work. With this key idea, we design TeraPipe, a high-performance token-level pipeline parallel algorithm for synchronous model-parallel training of Transformer-based language models. We develop a novel dynamic programming-based algorithm to calculate the optimal pipelining execution scheme given a specific model and cluster configuration. We show that TeraPipe can speed up the training by 5.0x for the largest GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters on an AWS cluster with 48 p3.16xlarge instances compared with state-of-the-art model-parallel methods. The code for reproduction can be found at https://github.com/zhuohan123/terapipe  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1730628
PAR ID:
10310424
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning
Volume:
139
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. FPGA-based edge servers are used in many applications in smart cities, hospitals, retail, etc. Equipped with heterogeneous FPGA-based accelerator cards, the servers can be implemented with multiple tasks including efficient video prepossessing, machine learning algorithm acceleration, etc. These servers are required to implement inference during the daytime while re-training the model during the night to adapt to new environments, domains, or new users. During the re-training, conventionally, the incoming data are transmitted to the cloud, and then the updated machine learning models will be transferred back to the edge server. Such a process is inefficient and cannot protect users’ privacy, so it is desirable for the models to be directly trained on the edge servers. Deploying convolutional neural network (CNN) training on heterogeneous resource-constrained FPGAs is challenging since it needs to consider both the complex data dependency of the training process and the communication bottleneck among different FPGAs. Previous multi-accelerator training algorithms select optimal scheduling strategies for data parallelism, tensor parallelism, and pipeline parallelism. However, pipeline parallelism cannot deal with batch normalization (BN) which is an essential CNN operator, while purely applying data parallelism and tensor parallelism suffers from resource under-utilization and intensive communication costs. In this work, we propose MTrain, a novel multi-accelerator training scheduling strategy that transfers the training process into a multi-branch workflow, thus independent sub-operations of different branches are executed on different training accelerators in parallelism for better utilization and reduced communication overhead. Experimental results show that we can achieve efficient CNN training on heterogeneous FPGA-based edge servers with 1.07x-2.21x speedup under 15 GB/s peer-to-peer bandwidth compared to the state-of-the-art work. 
    more » « less
  2. With the rapid innovation of GPUs, heterogeneous GPU clusters in both public clouds and on-premise data centers have become increasingly commonplace. In this paper, we demonstrate how pipeline parallelism, a technique wellstudied for throughput-oriented deep learning model training, can be used effectively for serving latency-bound model inference, e.g., in video analytics systems, on heterogeneous GPU clusters. Our work exploits the synergy between diversity in model layers and diversity in GPU architectures, which results in comparable inference latency for many layers when running on low-class and high-class GPUs. We explore how such overlooked capability of low-class GPUs can be exploited using pipeline parallelism and present a novel inference serving system, PPipe, that employs pool-based pipeline parallelism via an MILP-based control plane and a data plane that performs resource reservation-based adaptive batching. Evaluation results on diverse workloads (18 CNN models) show that PPipe achieves 41.1%–65.5% higher utilization of low-class GPUs while maintaining high utilization of high-class GPUs, leading to 32.2%–75.1% higher serving throughput compared to various baselines. 
    more » « less
  3. 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). 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    The size of Transformer models is growing at an unprecedented rate. It has taken less than one year to reach trillion-level parameters since the release of GPT-3 (175B). Training such models requires both substantial engineering efforts and enormous computing resources, which are luxuries most research teams cannot afford. In this paper, we propose PipeTransformer, which leverages automated elastic pipelining for efficient distributed training of Transformer models. In PipeTransformer, we design an adaptive on the fly freeze algorithm that can identify and freeze some layers gradually during training, and an elastic pipelining system that can dynamically allocate resources to train the remaining active layers. More specifically, PipeTransformer automatically excludes frozen layers from the pipeline, packs active layers into fewer GPUs, and forks more replicas to increase data-parallel width. We evaluate PipeTransformer using Vision Transformer (ViT) on ImageNet and BERT on SQuAD and GLUE datasets. Our results show that compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, PipeTransformer attains up to 2:83- fold speedup without losing accuracy. We also provide various performance analyses for a more comprehensive understanding of our algorithmic and system-wise design. Finally, we have modularized our training system with flexible APIs and made the source code publicly available at https://DistML.ai. 
    more » « less
  5. Many state-of-the-art ML results have been obtained by scaling up the number of parameters in existing models. However, parameters and activations for such large models often do not fit in the memory of a single accelerator device; this means that it is necessary to distribute training of large models over multiple accelerators. In this work, we propose PipeDream-2BW, a system that supports memory-efficient pipeline parallelism. PipeDream-2BW uses a novel pipelining and weight gradient coalescing strategy, combined with the double buffering of weights, to ensure high throughput, low memory footprint, and weight update semantics similar to data parallelism. In addition, PipeDream-2BW automatically partitions the model over the available hardware resources, while respecting hardware constraints such as memory capacities of accelerators and interconnect topologies. PipeDream-2BW can accelerate the training of large GPT and BERT language models by up to 20x with similar final model accuracy. 
    more » « less