HALoS: Hierarchical Asynchronous Local SGD over Slow Networks for Geo-Distributed Large Language Model Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kim, Geon-Woo, Li, Junbo, Gandham, Shashidhar, Baldonado, Omar, Gangidi, Adithya, Balaji, Pavan, Wang, Zhangyang, Akella, Aditya
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kim, Geon-Woo
Li, Junbo
Gandham, Shashidhar
Baldonado, Omar
Gangidi, Adithya
Balaji, Pavan
Wang, Zhangyang
Akella, Aditya
author_facet Kim, Geon-Woo
Li, Junbo
Gandham, Shashidhar
Baldonado, Omar
Gangidi, Adithya
Balaji, Pavan
Wang, Zhangyang
Akella, Aditya
contents Training large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on geographically distributed accelerators, causing prohibitive communication costs across regions and uneven utilization of heterogeneous hardware. We propose HALoS, a hierarchical asynchronous optimization framework that tackles these issues by introducing local parameter servers (LPSs) within each region and a global parameter server (GPS) that merges updates across regions. This hierarchical design minimizes expensive inter-region communication, reduces straggler effects, and leverages fast intra-region links. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis for HALoS under non-convex objectives, including theoretical guarantees on the role of hierarchical momentum in asynchronous training. Empirically, HALoS attains up to 7.5x faster convergence than synchronous baselines in geo-distributed LLM training and improves upon existing asynchronous methods by up to 2.1x. Crucially, HALoS preserves the model quality of fully synchronous SGD-matching or exceeding accuracy on standard language modeling and downstream benchmarks-while substantially lowering total training time. These results demonstrate that hierarchical, server-side update accumulation and global model merging are powerful tools for scalable, efficient training of new-era LLMs in heterogeneous, geo-distributed environments.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_04531
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HALoS: Hierarchical Asynchronous Local SGD over Slow Networks for Geo-Distributed Large Language Model Training
Kim, Geon-Woo
Li, Junbo
Gandham, Shashidhar
Baldonado, Omar
Gangidi, Adithya
Balaji, Pavan
Wang, Zhangyang
Akella, Aditya
Machine Learning
Training large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on geographically distributed accelerators, causing prohibitive communication costs across regions and uneven utilization of heterogeneous hardware. We propose HALoS, a hierarchical asynchronous optimization framework that tackles these issues by introducing local parameter servers (LPSs) within each region and a global parameter server (GPS) that merges updates across regions. This hierarchical design minimizes expensive inter-region communication, reduces straggler effects, and leverages fast intra-region links. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis for HALoS under non-convex objectives, including theoretical guarantees on the role of hierarchical momentum in asynchronous training. Empirically, HALoS attains up to 7.5x faster convergence than synchronous baselines in geo-distributed LLM training and improves upon existing asynchronous methods by up to 2.1x. Crucially, HALoS preserves the model quality of fully synchronous SGD-matching or exceeding accuracy on standard language modeling and downstream benchmarks-while substantially lowering total training time. These results demonstrate that hierarchical, server-side update accumulation and global model merging are powerful tools for scalable, efficient training of new-era LLMs in heterogeneous, geo-distributed environments.
title HALoS: Hierarchical Asynchronous Local SGD over Slow Networks for Geo-Distributed Large Language Model Training
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04531