FALCON: Pinpointing and Mitigating Stragglers for Large-Scale Hybrid-Parallel Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wu, Tianyuan, Wang, Wei, Yu, Yinghao, Yang, Siran, Wu, Wenchao, Duan, Qinkai, Yang, Guodong, Wang, Jiamang, Qu, Lin, Zhang, Liping
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Wu, Tianyuan
Wang, Wei
Yu, Yinghao
Yang, Siran
Wu, Wenchao
Duan, Qinkai
Yang, Guodong
Wang, Jiamang
Qu, Lin
Zhang, Liping
author_facet Wu, Tianyuan
Wang, Wei
Yu, Yinghao
Yang, Siran
Wu, Wenchao
Duan, Qinkai
Yang, Guodong
Wang, Jiamang
Qu, Lin
Zhang, Liping
contents Fail-slows, or stragglers, are common but largely unheeded problems in large-scale hybrid-parallel training that spans thousands of GPU servers and runs for weeks to months. Yet, these problems are not well studied, nor can they be quickly detected and effectively mitigated. In this paper, we first present a characterization study on a shared production cluster with over 10,000 GPUs1. We find that fail-slows are caused by various CPU/GPU computation and cross-node networking issues, lasting from tens of seconds to nearly ten hours, and collectively delaying the average job completion time by 1.34%. The current practice is to manually detect these fail-slows and simply treat them as fail-stops using a checkpoint-and-restart failover approach, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose FALCON, a framework that rapidly identifies fail-slowed GPUs and/or communication links, and effectively tackles them with a novel multi-level mitigation mechanism, all without human intervention. We have applied FALCON to detect human-labeled fail-slows in a production cluster with over 99% accuracy. Cluster deployment further demonstrates that FALCON effectively handles manually injected fail-slows, mitigating the training slowdown by 60.1%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_12588
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FALCON: Pinpointing and Mitigating Stragglers for Large-Scale Hybrid-Parallel Training
Wu, Tianyuan
Wang, Wei
Yu, Yinghao
Yang, Siran
Wu, Wenchao
Duan, Qinkai
Yang, Guodong
Wang, Jiamang
Qu, Lin
Zhang, Liping
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Operating Systems
Fail-slows, or stragglers, are common but largely unheeded problems in large-scale hybrid-parallel training that spans thousands of GPU servers and runs for weeks to months. Yet, these problems are not well studied, nor can they be quickly detected and effectively mitigated. In this paper, we first present a characterization study on a shared production cluster with over 10,000 GPUs1. We find that fail-slows are caused by various CPU/GPU computation and cross-node networking issues, lasting from tens of seconds to nearly ten hours, and collectively delaying the average job completion time by 1.34%. The current practice is to manually detect these fail-slows and simply treat them as fail-stops using a checkpoint-and-restart failover approach, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose FALCON, a framework that rapidly identifies fail-slowed GPUs and/or communication links, and effectively tackles them with a novel multi-level mitigation mechanism, all without human intervention. We have applied FALCON to detect human-labeled fail-slows in a production cluster with over 99% accuracy. Cluster deployment further demonstrates that FALCON effectively handles manually injected fail-slows, mitigating the training slowdown by 60.1%.
title FALCON: Pinpointing and Mitigating Stragglers for Large-Scale Hybrid-Parallel Training
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12588