Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bai, Huawei, Huang, Yifan, Shi, Wenqi, You, Ansheng, Shao, Feifan, Han, Tengfei, Yu, Minghui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20111
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912665753878528
author Bai, Huawei
Huang, Yifan
Shi, Wenqi
You, Ansheng
Shao, Feifan
Han, Tengfei
Yu, Minghui
author_facet Bai, Huawei
Huang, Yifan
Shi, Wenqi
You, Ansheng
Shao, Feifan
Han, Tengfei
Yu, Minghui
contents The training efficiency and scalability of language models on massive clusters currently remain a critical bottleneck. Mainstream approaches like ND parallelism are often cumbersome and complex, while flexible alternatives such as the Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) are frequently hampered by communication overhead. In this paper, we propose Asynchronous Hierarchical Zero Parallelism (AsyncHZP), a novel asynchronous variant of ZeRO designed to achieve superior performance while maintaining simplicity and memory efficiency. Unlike traditional ZeRO, which employs over-fine-grained sharding that can lead to inefficient communication, AsyncHZP adaptively reshards parameters, gradients, and optimizer states across different replica groups. This strategy optimizes device memory utilization and significantly reduces communication overhead. In addition, we also design a multi-stream asynchronous scheduling method that executes parameter all-gather and gradient reduce-scatter operations in dedicated background threads, effectively overlapping communication with computation while incurring negligible memory fragmentation. Empirical evaluations on both Dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models confirm that AsyncHZP maintains robust stability at scale. It consistently outperforms classic ND parallelism, achieving state-of-the-art performance without complex strategic tuning, thereby simplifying the path to efficient large-scale training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_20111
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AsyncHZP: Hierarchical ZeRO Parallelism with Asynchronous Scheduling for Scalable LLM Training
Bai, Huawei
Huang, Yifan
Shi, Wenqi
You, Ansheng
Shao, Feifan
Han, Tengfei
Yu, Minghui
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
The training efficiency and scalability of language models on massive clusters currently remain a critical bottleneck. Mainstream approaches like ND parallelism are often cumbersome and complex, while flexible alternatives such as the Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) are frequently hampered by communication overhead. In this paper, we propose Asynchronous Hierarchical Zero Parallelism (AsyncHZP), a novel asynchronous variant of ZeRO designed to achieve superior performance while maintaining simplicity and memory efficiency. Unlike traditional ZeRO, which employs over-fine-grained sharding that can lead to inefficient communication, AsyncHZP adaptively reshards parameters, gradients, and optimizer states across different replica groups. This strategy optimizes device memory utilization and significantly reduces communication overhead. In addition, we also design a multi-stream asynchronous scheduling method that executes parameter all-gather and gradient reduce-scatter operations in dedicated background threads, effectively overlapping communication with computation while incurring negligible memory fragmentation. Empirical evaluations on both Dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models confirm that AsyncHZP maintains robust stability at scale. It consistently outperforms classic ND parallelism, achieving state-of-the-art performance without complex strategic tuning, thereby simplifying the path to efficient large-scale training.
title AsyncHZP: Hierarchical ZeRO Parallelism with Asynchronous Scheduling for Scalable LLM Training
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20111