稀疏专家模型的最优稀疏度由系统约束决定,而非单纯计算效率。
Compute-Optimal Is Not Cluster-Optimal: Systems-Aware Scaling for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

- 将模型架构与系统实现联合优化,用可预测的缩放规律和性能模型指导设计
- 在1.04亿到27亿活跃参数间,越稀疏模型损失越低,计算最优在稀疏上限
- 揭示系统资源限制才是稀疏专家模型最优稀疏度的关键,适合大规模训练团队
大规模预训练中,算法、架构与系统决策常分阶段进行。本文提出MOSAIC框架,将模型架构与系统协同设计建模为优化问题。该框架结合可预测的缩放规律与校准的性能模型,评估模型浮点利用率(MFU)、通信开销、内存占用及最优并行布局。针对稀疏混合专家(MoE)语言模型,研究涵盖专家数量、路由稀疏度等维度对损失与系统效率的影响。在文本数据上拟合的缩放规律覆盖从1.04亿到27亿活跃参数,总模型规模达790亿参数。结果表明,在校准的稀疏范围内,仅追求计算效率的模型无法获得内部最优稀疏度;损失随稀疏度增加单调下降,计算最优位于数据支持的上界。真正的最优稀疏度由集群系统约束决定,MOSAIC能准确捕捉这一现象。研究主张向统一的架构-系统协同设计转变。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In large-scale pretraining, the algorithm, architecture, and systems decisions are conventionally made in disconnected stages. A scaling law stage selects an architecture and training recipe, optimizing loss under compute constraints, and a separate systems stage then optimizes the implementation for hardware efficiency. In this work, we develop MOSAIC, which formulates model architecture and systems co-design as an optimization problem. MOSAIC couples a predictive scaling law with a calibrated performance model that estimates Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU), communication cost, memory footprint, and the best parallel layout. We instantiate the framework for sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models, where expert count, routing sparsity, and other MoE layer dimensions affect both the loss and systems efficiency. We fit a scaling law on sparse MoE models trained on text data, whose scaling dimensions include the sparsity factor, which is the fraction of model parameters inactive per token in a forward pass. The scaling law sweeps in our work span active parameters from $104$ million to $2.7$ billion and total model sizes reaching $79$ billion parameters. We show that, within the calibrated sparsity range, an efficiency-agnostic model-FLOPs budget admits no interior optimal sparsity. The fitted loss decreases monotonically with sparser models and the compute optimum lies at the upper boundary of the data support. An optimal sparsity in MoE models instead emerges under the cluster's systems constraints, as captured by MOSAIC. Our results argue for a shift towards unified architecture and systems co-design for frontier language model training.
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