剖析大模型训练的能效与热特性,揭示硬件与算法协同的关键规律。
Characterizing the Efficiency of Distributed Training: A Power, Performance, and Thermal Perspective
- 对比不同并行策略在多GPU下的资源利用与能耗表现。
- 发现高内存单卡系统在通信瓶颈下可超越分布式部署,但需精细调优。
- 指出张量+流水线并行导致带宽浪费,过大微批量引发峰值功耗和过热。
大型语言模型(LLMs)的快速扩展已使训练负载远超单机分析能力,亟需深入理解其在大规模多GPU系统中的行为。本文对多种真实工作负载和硬件平台(NVIDIA H100/H200、AMD MI250)上的LLM训练进行了全面表征,分析了密集与稀疏模型在张量、流水线、数据和专家并行等策略下的硬件利用率、功耗与热行为。评估了激活重计算和计算-通信重叠等优化效果。结果表明,性能不仅取决于硬件规模:在通信瓶颈场景下,少而高内存的单卡系统可通过精心配置超越分布式系统;而在其他情况下,分布式部署更具吞吐优势。此外,张量+流水线并行因数据分块效率低导致带宽未充分利用;微批量过大则引发执行突发和峰值功耗,加剧热节流。这些发现揭示了硬件、系统拓扑与模型执行之间的复杂交互关系。最后提出面向未来大模型系统的软硬件设计建议。源代码见 https://github.com/sitar-lab/CharLLM-PPT。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The rapid scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has pushed training workloads far beyond the limits of single-node analysis, demanding a deeper understanding of how these models behave across large-scale, multi-GPU systems. In this paper, we present a comprehensive characterization of LLM training across diverse real-world workloads and hardware platforms, including NVIDIA H100/H200 and AMD MI250 GPUs. We analyze dense and sparse models under various parallelism strategies -- tensor, pipeline, data, and expert -- and evaluate their effects on hardware utilization, power consumption, and thermal behavior. We further evaluate the effectiveness of optimizations such as activation recomputation and compute-communication overlap. Our findings show that performance is not determined solely by scaling hardware capacity. Scale-up systems with fewer, higher-memory GPUs can outperform scale-out systems in communication-bound regimes, but only under carefully tuned configurations; in other cases, scale-out deployments achieve superior throughput. We also show that certain parallelism combinations, such as tensor with pipeline, lead to bandwidth underutilization due to inefficient data chunking, while increasing microbatch sizes beyond a certain point induces bursty execution and peak power excursions that worsen thermal throttling. These insights reveal how training performance is shaped by complex interactions between hardware, system topology, and model execution. We conclude by offering recommendations for system and hardware design to improve the scalability and reliability of future LLM systems and workloads. The source code of this project is available at https://github.com/sitar-lab/CharLLM-PPT.
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