Training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with billions of parameters generally involves pipeline-parallel (PP) execution. Unfortunately, PP model training can use GPUs inefficiently, especially at large scale, due to idle GPU time caused by pipeline bubbles, which are often 15-30% and can exceed 60% of the training job's GPU allocation. To improve the GPU utilization of PP model training, this paper describes PipeFill, which fills pipeline bubbles with execution of other pending jobs. By leveraging bubble GPU time, PipeFill reduces the GPU utilization sacrifice associated with scaling-up of large-model training. To context-switch between fill jobs and the main training job with minimal overhead to the main job, and maximize fill job efficiency, PipeFill carefully fits fill job work to measured bubble durations and GPU memory availability, introduces explicit pipeline-bubble instructions, and orchestrates placement and execution of fill jobs in pipeline bubbles. Experiments show that PipeFill can increase overall utilization by up to 63% for GPUs used in large-scale LLM training, with <2% slowdown of the training job, and 5-15% even for low-scale LLM training. For large-scale LLM training on 8K GPUs, the 63% increase translates to up to 2.6K additional GPUs worth of work completed.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) continue to grow rapidly in size, making them infeasible to train on a single device. Pipeline parallelism is commonly used in existing DNN systems to support large-scale DNN training by partitioning a DNN into multiple stages, which concurrently perform DNN training for different micro-batches in a pipeline fashion. However, existing pipeline-parallel approaches only consider sequential pipeline stages and thus ignore the topology of a DNN, resulting in missed model-parallel opportunities. This paper presents graph pipeline parallelism (GPP), a new pipeline-parallel scheme that partitions a DNN into pipeline stages whose dependencies are identified by a directed acyclic graph. GPP generalizes existing sequential pipeline parallelism and preserves the inherent topology of a DNN to enable concurrent execution of computationally-independent operators, resulting in reduced memory requirement and improved GPU performance. In addition, we develop GraphPipe, a distributed system that exploits GPP strategies to enable performant and scalable DNN training. GraphPipe partitions a DNN into a graph of stages, optimizes micro-batch schedules for these stages, and parallelizes DNN training using the discovered GPP strategies. Evaluation on a variety of DNNs shows that GraphPipe outperforms existing pipeline-parallel systems such as PipeDream and Piper by up to 1.6X. GraphPipe also reduces the search time by 9-21X compared to PipeDream and Piper.

This approach is also called autoregressive decoding because each The high computational and memory requirements of generative generated token is also used as input for generating future large language models (LLMs) make it challenging tokens. This dependency between tokens is crucial for many to serve them quickly and cheaply. This paper introduces NLP tasks that require preserving the order and context of the SpecInfer, an LLM serving system that accelerates generative generated tokens, such as text completion [53]. LLM inference with speculative inference and token tree Existing LLM systems generally use an incremental decoding verification. A key insight behind SpecInfer is to combine approach to serving a request where the system computes various collectively boost-tuned small language models to the activations for all prompt tokens in a single step and then jointly predict the LLM's outputs; the predictions are organized iteratively decodes one new token using the input prompt as a token tree, whose nodes each represent a candidate and all previously generated tokens. This approach respects token sequence. The correctness of all candidate token sequences data dependencies between tokens, but achieves suboptimal represented by a token tree is verified against the runtime performance and limited GPU utilization, since the LLM in parallel using a novel tree-based parallel decoding degree of parallelism within each request is greatly limited in mechanism. SpecInfer uses an LLM as a token tree verifier the incremental phase. In addition, the attention mechanism of instead of an incremental decoder, which significantly Transformer [46] requires accessing the keys and values of all reduces the end-to-end latency and computational requirement previous tokens to compute the attention output of a new token.