提升大模型强化学习训练效率,让昇腾集群跑得更快更省内存。
MindSpeed RL: Distributed Dataflow for Scalable and Efficient RL Training on Ascend NPU Cluster
- 从分布式视角重构数据流,优化采样与重分片流程
- 在384个昇腾NPU上实现1.42~3.97倍吞吐提升
- 适合大规模强化学习训练的系统级优化,开源可用
强化学习(RL)正被广泛用于对齐大型语言模型。主流RL算法依赖多个工作节点,可建模为图结构,其中节点代表工作节点状态,边表示节点间数据流动。由于强跨节点依赖,现有训练系统普遍存在集群扩展性差、内存利用率低的问题。本文提出MindSpeed RL,一种高效的大规模强化学习训练系统。不同于传统集中式方法,该系统从分布式视角组织训练中的关键数据依赖——采样流与重分片流。一方面,设计分布式传输舱策略,在传统回放缓冲区基础上设置控制器与仓库,降低采样流调度开销;另一方面,提出实用的allgather--swap策略,消除重分片流中的冗余内存占用。此外,系统还集成多种并行化策略与加速技术以实现整体优化。在基于昇腾384个神经处理单元(NPUs)的超节点集群上,针对Qwen2.5-Dense-7B/32B、Qwen3-MoE-30B和DeepSeek-R1-MoE-671B等模型的强化学习训练实验表明,相比现有最先进系统,MindSpeed RL的吞吐量提升达1.42~3.97倍。项目已开源,并验证了昇腾平台在大规模训练中的强大性能与可靠性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a paradigm increasingly used to align large language models. Popular RL algorithms utilize multiple workers and can be modeled as a graph, where each node is the status of a worker and each edge represents dataflow between nodes. Owing to the heavy cross-node dependencies, the RL training system usually suffers from poor cluster scalability and low memory utilization. In this article, we introduce MindSpeed RL, an effective and efficient system for large-scale RL training. Unlike existing centralized methods, MindSpeed RL organizes the essential data dependencies in RL training, i.e., sample flow and resharding flow, from a distributed view. On the one hand, a distributed transfer dock strategy, which sets controllers and warehouses on the basis of the conventional replay buffer, is designed to release the dispatch overhead in the sample flow. A practical allgather--swap strategy is presented to eliminate redundant memory usage in resharding flow. In addition, MindSpeed RL further integrates numerous parallelization strategies and acceleration techniques for systematic optimization. Compared with existing state-of-the-art systems, comprehensive experiments on the RL training of popular Qwen2.5-Dense-7B/32B, Qwen3-MoE-30B, and DeepSeek-R1-MoE-671B show that MindSpeed RL increases the throughput by 1.42 ~ 3.97 times. Finally, we open--source MindSpeed RL and perform all the experiments on a super pod of Ascend with 384 neural processing units (NPUs) to demonstrate the powerful performance and reliability of Ascend.
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