Distributed deep learning (DL) training faces instability from GPU/node failures of multi-GPU clusters, necessitating robust fault recovery from model checkpoints. However, we find that existing works only considers node failures but fails to handle partial GPU unavailability, and suffers from inefficient model checkpointing saving and loading, particularly when the GPU availability changes.

As the scale of models and training data continues to grow, there is an expanding reliance on more GPUs to train large-scale models, which inevitably increases the likelihood of encountering dynamic stragglers that some devices lag behind in performance occasionally. However, hybrid parallel training, one of the de facto paradigms to train large models, is typically sensitive to the stragglers. This paper presents Malleus , a straggler-resilient hybrid parallel training framework for large-scale models. Malleus quantifies the stragglers at the nuanced, per-GPU granularity during training, and develops a novel planning algorithm to deduce the optimal parallelization of GPU devices, pipeline stages, model layers, and training data, maximizing training efficiency when stragglers exist. In addition, once a shift in the straggler situation is detected, Malleus adaptively adjusts the parallelization via a re-planning process, and seamlessly and efficiently migrates the model states on the fly, without sacrificing the stability of the training tasks. Empirical results on large language models with up to 110B parameters show that Malleus consistently outperforms existing parallel training frameworks under various straggler situations, delivering on average 2.63-5.28x of efficiency improvement.

To optimize large Transformer model training, both efficient parallel computing and advanced data management are indispensable. However, current methods often assume a stable and uniform training workload, neglecting data-induced imbalances-arising from both sampling and packing processes-which can impede training performance. Specifically, data sampling imbalance arises from uneven sequence length distribution of the training data, while data packing imbalance stems from the discrepancy between the linear memory complexity and quadratic time complexity of the attention mechanism. To address these imbalance issues, we develop Hydraulis, which jointly optimizes the parallel strategies and data assignment. For one thing, we introduce large model training with dynamic heterogeneous parallel strategies in response to the sequence length variations within and across training iterations. For another, we devise a two-stage data assignment approach, which strikes a good balance in terms of the training workloads both within and across model replicas. Empirical results demonstrate that Hydraulis outperforms existing systems by 1.32-2.66×. Our source code is available: https://github.com/PKU-DAIR/Hetu.

With the breakthrough of Transformer-based pre-trained models, the demand for fine-tuning (FT) to adapt the base pre-trained models to downstream applications continues to grow, so it is essential for service providers to reduce the cost of processing FT requests. Low-rank adaption (LoRA) is a widely used FT technique that only trains small-scale adapters and keeps the base model unaltered, conveying the possibility of processing multiple FT tasks by jointly training different LoRA adapters with a shared base model. Nevertheless, through in-depth analysis, we reveal the efficiency of joint FT is dampened by two heterogeneity issues in the training data — the sequence length variation and skewness. To tackle these issues, we develop LobRA, a brand new framework that supports processing multiple FT tasks by jointly training LoRA adapters. Two innovative designs are introduced. Firstly, LobRA deploys the FT replicas (i.e., model replicas for FT) with heterogeneous resource usages and parallel configurations, matching the diverse workloads caused by the sequence length variation. Secondly, for each training step, LobRA takes account of the sequence length skewness and dispatches the training data among the heterogeneous FT replicas to achieve workload balance. We conduct experiments to assess the performance of LobRA, validating that it significantly reduces the GPU seconds required for joint FT by 45.03%-60.67%.