ZeRO & DeepSpeed: New system optimizations enable training models with over 100 billion parameters - Microsoft Research

The latest trend in AI is that larger natural language models provide better accuracy; however, larger models are difficult to train because of cost, time, and ease of code integration. Microsoft is releasing an open-source library called DeepSpeed, which vastly advances large model training by improving scale, speed, cost, and usability, unlocking the ability to train 100-billion-parameter models. One piece of that library, called ZeRO, is a new parallelized optimizer that greatly reduces the resources needed for model and data parallelism while massively increasing the number of parameters that can be trained. Researchers have used these breakthroughs to create Turing Natural Language Generation (Turing-NLG), the largest publicly known language model at 17 billion parameters, which you can learn more about in this accompanying blog post. The Zero Redundancy Optimizer (abbreviated ZeRO) is a novel memory optimization technology for large-scale distributed deep learning.