Piper: Efficient Large-Scale MoE Training via Resource Modeling and Pipelined Hybrid Parallelism

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Hauptverfasser: Dash, Sajal, Wang, Feiyi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Dash, Sajal
Wang, Feiyi
author_facet Dash, Sajal
Wang, Feiyi
contents Frontier models increasingly adopt Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures to achieve large-model performance at reduced cost. However, training MoE models on HPC platforms is hindered by large memory footprints, frequent large-scale communication across heterogeneous networks, and severe workload imbalance. To characterize these challenges, we develop a mathematical model that quantifies memory, compute, and communication requirements for MoE configurations under various parallelization schemes, verified through micro-benchmarking, code instrumentation, and hardware profiling. Our analysis identifies performance bottlenecks: all-to-all latency at scale from expert parallelism, insufficient compute-communication overlap, low GPU utilization from imbalanced skinny GEMMs, and the absence of platform-aware hybrid parallelization strategies. To address these, we introduce Piper, a framework that leverages resource modeling to identify efficient training strategies for MoE models on target HPC platforms, applying pipeline parallelism with optimized schedules. Piper achieves 2-3.5X higher MFU than state-of-the-art frameworks such as X-MoE, and a novel all-to-all algorithm delivers 1.2-9X bandwidth over vendor implementation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_05049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Piper: Efficient Large-Scale MoE Training via Resource Modeling and Pipelined Hybrid Parallelism
Dash, Sajal
Wang, Feiyi
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Frontier models increasingly adopt Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures to achieve large-model performance at reduced cost. However, training MoE models on HPC platforms is hindered by large memory footprints, frequent large-scale communication across heterogeneous networks, and severe workload imbalance. To characterize these challenges, we develop a mathematical model that quantifies memory, compute, and communication requirements for MoE configurations under various parallelization schemes, verified through micro-benchmarking, code instrumentation, and hardware profiling. Our analysis identifies performance bottlenecks: all-to-all latency at scale from expert parallelism, insufficient compute-communication overlap, low GPU utilization from imbalanced skinny GEMMs, and the absence of platform-aware hybrid parallelization strategies. To address these, we introduce Piper, a framework that leverages resource modeling to identify efficient training strategies for MoE models on target HPC platforms, applying pipeline parallelism with optimized schedules. Piper achieves 2-3.5X higher MFU than state-of-the-art frameworks such as X-MoE, and a novel all-to-all algorithm delivers 1.2-9X bandwidth over vendor implementation.
title Piper: Efficient Large-Scale MoE Training via Resource Modeling and Pipelined Hybrid Parallelism
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05049