A Multidimensional Communication Scheduling Method for Hybrid Parallel DNN Training

The transformer-based deep neural network (DNN) models have shown considerable success across diverse tasks, prompting widespread adoption of distributed training methods such as data parallelism and pipeline parallelism. With the increasing parameter number, hybrid parallel training becomes imperative to scale training. The primary bottleneck in scaling remains the communication overhead. The communication scheduling technique, emphasizing the overlap of communication with computation, has demonstrated its benefits in scaling. However, most existing works focus on data parallelism, overlooking the nuances of hybrid parallel training. In this paper, we propose
TriRace
, an efficient communication scheduling framework for accelerating communications in hybrid parallel training of asynchronous pipeline parallelism and data parallelism. To achieve effective computation-communication overlap,
TriRace
introduces
3D communication scheduling
, which adeptly leverages data dependencies between communication and computations, efficiently scheduling AllReduce communication, sparse communication, and peer-to-peer communication in hybrid parallel training. To avoid possible communication contentions,
TriRace
also incorporates a
topology-aware runtime
which optimizes the execution of communication operations by considering ongoing communication operations and real-time network status. We have implemented a prototype of
TriRace
based on PyTorch and Pipedream-2BW, and conducted comprehensive evaluations with three representative baselines. Experimental results show that
TriRace
achieves up to 1.07–1.45× speedup compared to the state-of-the-art pipeline parallelism training baseline Pipedream-2BW, and 1.24–1.81× speedup compared to the Megatron.