Training large language models (LLMs) in the cloud faces growing memory bottlenecks due to the limited capacity and high cost of GPUs. While GPU memory offloading to CPU and NVMe has made large-scale training more feasible, existing approaches suffer from high tensor migration latency and suboptimal device memory utilization, ultimately increasing training time and cloud costs. To address these challenges, we present 10Cache, a resource-aware tensor caching and migration system that accelerates LLM training by intelligently coordinating memory usage across GPU, CPU, and NVMe tiers. 10Cache profiles tensor execution order to construct prefetch policies, allocates memory buffers in pinned memory based on tensor size distributions, and reuses memory buffers to minimize allocation overhead. Designed for cloud-scale deployments, 10Cache improves memory efficiency and reduces reliance on high-end GPUs. Across diverse LLM workloads, it achieves up to 2x speedup in training time, improves GPU cache hit rate by up to 86.6x, and increases CPU/GPU memory utilization by up to 2.15x and 1.33x, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art offloading methods. These results demonstrate that 10Cache is a practical and scalable solution for optimizing LLM training throughput and resource efficiency in cloud environments.

Microsoft recently announced ZeRO-Infinity, an addition to their open-source DeepSpeed AI training library that optimizes memory use for training very large deep-learning models. Using ZeRO-Infinity, Microsoft trained a model with 32 trillion parameters on a cluster of 32 GPUs, and demonstrated fine-tuning of a 1 trillion parameter model on a single GPU. The DeepSpeed team described the new features in a recent blog post. ZeRO-Infinity is the latest iteration of the Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) family of memory optimization techniques. ZeRO-Infinity introduces several new strategies for addressing memory and bandwidth constraints when training large deep-learning models, including: a new offload engine for exploiting CPU and Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) memory, memory-centric tiling to handle large operators without model-parallelism, bandwidth-centric partitioning for reducing bandwidth costs, and an overlap-centric design for scheduling data communication.

In the last three years, the largest dense deep learning models have grown over 1000x to reach hundreds of billions of parameters, while the GPU memory has only grown by 5x (16 GB to 80 GB). Therefore, the growth in model scale has been supported primarily though system innovations that allow large models to fit in the aggregate GPU memory of multiple GPUs. However, we are getting close to the GPU memory wall. It requires 800 NVIDIA V100 GPUs just to fit a trillion parameter model for training, and such clusters are simply out of reach for most data scientists. In addition, training models at that scale requires complex combinations of parallelism techniques that puts a big burden on the data scientists to refactor their model. In this paper we present ZeRO-Infinity, a novel heterogeneous system technology that leverages GPU, CPU, and NVMe memory to allow for unprecedented model scale on limited resources without requiring model code refactoring. At the same time it achieves excellent training throughput and scalability, unencumbered by the limited CPU or NVMe bandwidth. ZeRO-Infinity can fit models with tens and even hundreds of trillions of parameters for training on current generation GPU clusters. It can be used to fine-tune trillion parameter models on a single NVIDIA DGX-2 node, making large models more accessible. In terms of training throughput and scalability, it sustains over 25 petaflops on 512 NVIDIA V100 GPUs(40% of peak), while also demonstrating super linear scalability. An open source implementation of ZeRO-Infinity is available through DeepSpeed, a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training easy, efficient, and effective.