Papers › FastMoE: A Fast Mixture-of-Expert Training System

FastMoE: A Fast Mixture-of-Expert Training System

24 Mar 2021arXiv:2103.13262archive 2025-07-28

Jiaao He, Jiezhong Qiu, Aohan Zeng, Zhilin Yang, Jidong Zhai, Jie Tang

Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) presents a strong potential in enlarging the size of language model to trillions of parameters. However, training trillion-scale MoE requires algorithm and system co-design for a well-tuned high performance distributed training system. Unfortunately, the only existing platform that meets the requirements strongly depends on Google's hardware (TPU) and software (Mesh Tensorflow) stack, and is not open and available to the public, especially GPU and PyTorch communities. In this paper, we present FastMoE, a distributed MoE training system based on PyTorch with common accelerators. The system provides a hierarchical interface for both flexible model design and easy adaption to different applications, such as Transformer-XL and Megatron-LM. Different from direct implementation of MoE models using PyTorch, the training speed is highly optimized in FastMoE by sophisticated high-performance acceleration skills. The system supports placing different experts on multiple GPUs across multiple nodes, enabling enlarging the number of experts linearly against the number of GPUs. The source of FastMoE is available at https://github.com/laekov/fastmoe under Apache-2 license.

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davidmrau/mixture-of-experts officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
laekov/fastmoe officialmentioned in paperpytorchApache-2.0 report
Hanlard/M2M-by-fastmoe mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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dummy_data davidmrau/mixture-of-experts/example.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted GPL-3.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · f678813f38739b3c · report
float_from_env laekov/fastmoe/fmoe/fastermoe/config.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 83987936aaca71ca · report
get_expert_param_size laekov/fastmoe/fmoe/fastermoe/expert_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 268830a4a5f536e6 · report
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no_shadow_policy laekov/fastmoe/fmoe/fastermoe/shadow_policy.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 57456ba2ddb12fdf · report
switch_from_env laekov/fastmoe/fmoe/fastermoe/config.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 65b2f15dfaa83242 · report

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AdamAdaptive Input RepresentationsAdaptive SoftmaxAttentionCosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer-XLVariational Dropout

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