Papers › TeraPipe: Token-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Training Large-Scale Language Models

TeraPipe: Token-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Training Large-Scale Language Models

16 Feb 2021arXiv:2102.07988archive 2025-07-28

Zhuohan Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Shiyuan Guo, Danyang Zhuo, Hao Zhang, Dawn Song, Ion Stoica

Model parallelism has become a necessity for training modern large-scale deep language models. In this work, we identify a new and orthogonal dimension from existing model parallel approaches: it is possible to perform pipeline parallelism within a single training sequence for Transformer-based language models thanks to its autoregressive property. This enables a more fine-grained pipeline compared with previous work. With this key idea, we design TeraPipe, a high-performance token-level pipeline parallel algorithm for synchronous model-parallel training of Transformer-based language models. We develop a novel dynamic programming-based algorithm to calculate the optimal pipelining execution scheme given a specific model and cluster configuration. We show that TeraPipe can speed up the training by 5.0x for the largest GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters on an AWS cluster with 48 p3.16xlarge instances compared with state-of-the-art model-parallel methods. The code for reproduction can be found at https://github.com/zhuohan123/terapipe

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PipelineRecvOperator zhuohan123/terapipe/terapipe.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · 450bef055393e141 · report
PipelineSendOperator zhuohan123/terapipe/terapipe.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · 6260211b3b29a9a8 · report
TeraPipeBackwardPassHook zhuohan123/terapipe/terapipe.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · f1c69fa3f4d3535a · report
grid_slice_batch_and_sequence zhuohan123/terapipe/terapipe.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 6f9e8b5bfc4cea67 · report
loss_func zhuohan123/terapipe/terapipe.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 49e2a4eb90f7b049 · report
parse_json zhuohan123/terapipe/latency_model.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · b2bdcb303f86d948 · report
terapipe_backward_hook zhuohan123/terapipe/terapipe.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 6e0fd7b6636892a2 · report
TeraPipe zhuohan123/terapipe/terapipe.py official repository unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 6ec37d04aa8c8f4e · report

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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