WeiPipe: Weight Pipeline Parallelism for Communication-Effective Long-Context Large Model Training

Training large language models (LLMs) has become increasingly expensive due to the rapid expansion in model size. Pipeline parallelism is a widely used distributed training technique. However, as LLMs with larger context become prevalent and memory optimization techniques advance, traditional PP methods encounter greater communication challenges due to the increased size of activations and gradients of activations. To address this issue, we introduce weight-pipeline parallelism (WeiPipe) that transitions from an activation-passing pipeline to a weight-passing pipeline. WeiPipe reduces communication costs and achieves a more balanced utilization by transmitting only weights and their gradients between workers in a pipeline manner. WeiPipe does not rely on collective communication primitives, thus ensuring scalability. We present four variations of WeiPipe parallelism, including WeiPipe-Interleave, which emphasizes communication efficiency, and WeiPipe-zero-bubble, discussing the potential for minimal bubble ratios. Our implementation of WeiPipe-Interleave, performed on up to 32 GPUs and tested in various model configurations, including large-context LLM training, demonstrates a significant improvement in throughput compared to state-of-the-art pipeline parallelism and fully sharded data parallelism with different underlying infrastructures, including NVLink connections within cluster with Ethernet among cluster, and PCIe within cluster and Ethernet among cluster. Additionally, WeiPipe also shows greater scalability in communication-constrained scenarios compared to state-of-art strategies.