SpiderFlow: Efficient Topology-Aware Scheduling for LLM Training Across Decentralized GPU Clusters

In response to increasing demands for largescale machine learning training jobs, many organizations have deployed GPU clusters across geographically distributed regions. However, existing Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-or genetic-based cross-cluster training approaches largely overlook the topology of decentralized clusters, lacking both topology-aware task scheduling mechanisms and automated model parallelization strategies. As a result, naively applying these optimization-based methods in cross-cluster settings leads to prohibitive scheduling overhead, due to the drastically enlarged search space induced by complex inter-cluster topologies. To address these challenges, we propose SpiderFlow, a topologyaware scheduling system specifically designed for decentralized GPU clusters. We formulate cross-cluster task scheduling as a graph optimization problem and introduce SpinSearch, a low-overhead topology-aware scheduling algorithm. In addition, for automated model parallelization, we propose Topology-aware Parallelism Automation (TPA), a two-level scheduling framework that combines heuristic methods at the inter-cluster level with ILP-based optimization within clusters, effectively reducing the search space while maintaining high training throughput with substantially lower scheduling overhead. We evaluate SpiderFlow on a physical platform comprising 8 decentralized clusters, as well as on a simulation platform with up to 64 decentralized clusters. Experimental results demonstrate that SpiderFlow reduces job completion time (JCT) by 1.2-1.3×, improves throughput by 1.12-1.25×, and reduces scheduling overhead by 20-90× on average compared to state-of-the-art scheduling systems.