Large Language Models (LLMs) have scaled rapidly in size and complexity, requiring increasingly intricate parallelism for distributed training, such as 3D parallelism. This sophistication motivates a shift toward simpler, more debuggable programming paradigm like Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD). However, SPMD in eager execution introduces two key challenges: ensuring consistency with single-device execution and achieving high performance at scale. In this paper, we introduce veScale, an eager-mode training system that fully embraces SPMD paradigm to democratize distributed tensor programming. veScale addresses the prevalent issue of inconsistent results in systems like PyTorch by introducing a novel algorithm of distributed Random Number Generation (RNG) compatible with arbitrary sharded operators. veScale also significantly boosts training performance by reducing PyTorch primitive's overhead and improving communication efficiency. Evaluations show that veScale delivers up to 2.2x speedup over the state-of-the-art training systems, like TorchTitan, and cuts code complexity by 78.4%, while preserving single-device-equivalent results.

The development of large language models (LLMs) has been instrumental in advancing state-of-the-art natural language processing applications. Training LLMs with billions of parameters and trillions of tokens require sophisticated distributed systems that enable composing and comparing several state-of-the-art techniques in order to efficiently scale across thousands of accelerators. However, existing solutions are complex, scattered across multiple libraries/repositories, lack interoperability, and are cumbersome to maintain. Thus, curating and empirically comparing training recipes require non-trivial engineering effort. This paper introduces TorchTitan, an open-source, PyTorch-native distributed training system that unifies state-of-the-art techniques, streamlining integration and reducing overhead. TorchTitan enables 3D parallelism in a modular manner with elastic scaling, providing comprehensive logging, checkpointing, and debugging tools for production-ready training. It also incorporates hardware-software co-designed solutions, leveraging features like Float8 training and SymmetricMemory. As a flexible test bed, TorchTitan facilitates custom recipe curation and comparison, allowing us to develop optimized training recipes for Llama 3.1 and provide guidance on selecting techniques for maximum efficiency based on our experiences. We thoroughly assess TorchTitan on the Llama 3.1 family of LLMs, spanning 8 billion to 405 billion parameters, and showcase its exceptional performance, modular composability, and elastic scalability. By stacking training optimizations, we demonstrate accelerations of 65.08% with 1D parallelism at the 128-GPU scale (Llama 3.1 8B), an additional 12.59% with 2D parallelism at the 256-GPU scale (Llama 3.1 70B), and an additional 30% with 3D parallelism at the 512-GPU scale (Llama 3.1 405B) on NVIDIA H100 GPUs over optimized baselines.