Papers › Blink: Fast and Generic Collectives for Distributed ML

Blink: Fast and Generic Collectives for Distributed ML

11 Oct 2019arXiv:1910.04940archive 2025-07-28

Guanhua Wang, Shivaram Venkataraman, Amar Phanishayee, Jorgen Thelin, Nikhil Devanur, Ion Stoica

Model parameter synchronization across GPUs introduces high overheads for data-parallel training at scale. Existing parameter synchronization protocols cannot effectively leverage available network resources in the face of ever increasing hardware heterogeneity. To address this, we propose Blink, a collective communication library that dynamically generates optimal communication primitives by packing spanning trees. We propose techniques to minimize the number of trees generated and extend Blink to leverage heterogeneous communication channels for faster data transfers. Evaluations show that compared to the state-of-the-art (NCCL), Blink can achieve up to 8x faster model synchronization, and reduce end-to-end training time for image classification tasks by up to 40%.

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Image Classificationimage-classification

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Introduced by this paper: Blink Communication

Blink Communication

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