Eager Updates For Overlapped Communication and Computation in DiLoCo

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kale, Satyen, Douillard, Arthur, Donchev, Yanislav
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kale, Satyen
Douillard, Arthur
Donchev, Yanislav
author_facet Kale, Satyen
Douillard, Arthur
Donchev, Yanislav
contents Distributed optimization methods such as DiLoCo have been shown to be effective in training very large models across multiple distributed workers, such as datacenters. These methods split updates into two parts: an inner optimization phase, where the workers independently execute multiple optimization steps on their own local data, and an outer optimization step, where the inner updates are synchronized. While such approaches require orders of magnitude less communication than standard data-parallel training, in settings where the workers are datacenters, even the limited communication requirements of these approaches can still cause significant slow downs due to the blocking necessary at each outer optimization step. In this paper, we investigate techniques to mitigate this issue by overlapping communication with computation in a manner that allows the outer optimization step to fully overlap with the inner optimization phase. We show that a particular variant, dubbed eager updates, provides competitive performance with standard DiLoCo in settings with low bandwidth between workers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12996
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Eager Updates For Overlapped Communication and Computation in DiLoCo
Kale, Satyen
Douillard, Arthur
Donchev, Yanislav
Computation and Language
Distributed optimization methods such as DiLoCo have been shown to be effective in training very large models across multiple distributed workers, such as datacenters. These methods split updates into two parts: an inner optimization phase, where the workers independently execute multiple optimization steps on their own local data, and an outer optimization step, where the inner updates are synchronized. While such approaches require orders of magnitude less communication than standard data-parallel training, in settings where the workers are datacenters, even the limited communication requirements of these approaches can still cause significant slow downs due to the blocking necessary at each outer optimization step. In this paper, we investigate techniques to mitigate this issue by overlapping communication with computation in a manner that allows the outer optimization step to fully overlap with the inner optimization phase. We show that a particular variant, dubbed eager updates, provides competitive performance with standard DiLoCo in settings with low bandwidth between workers.
title Eager Updates For Overlapped Communication and Computation in DiLoCo
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12996