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Accelerating Distributed MoE Training and Inference with Lina

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arxiv 2210.17223 v2 pith:3B3D6YE7 submitted 2022-10-31 cs.DC

classification cs.DC
keywords all-to-allinferencelinamodeltrainingcomputationdistributedtime
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Scaling model parameters improves model quality at the price of high computation overhead. Sparsely activated models, usually in the form of Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, have sub-linear scaling of computation cost with model size, thus providing opportunities to train and serve a larger model at lower cost than their dense counterparts. However, distributed MoE training and inference is inefficient, mainly due to the interleaved all-to-all communication during model computation. This paper makes two main contributions. First, we systematically analyze all-to-all overhead in distributed MoE and present the main causes for it to be the bottleneck in training and inference, respectively. Second, we design and build Lina to address the all-to-all bottleneck head-on. Lina opportunistically prioritizes all-to-all over the concurrent allreduce whenever feasible using tensor partitioning, so all-to-all and training step time is improved. Lina further exploits the inherent pattern of expert selection to dynamically schedule resources during inference, so that the transfer size and bandwidth of all-to-all across devices are balanced amid the highly skewed expert popularity in practice. Experiments on an A100 GPU testbed show that Lina reduces the training step time by up to 1.73x and reduces the 95%ile inference time by an average of 1.63x over the state-of-the-art systems.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Hecate: Unlocking Efficient Sparse Model Training via Fully Sharded Sparse Data Parallelism

    cs.DC 2025-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Fully Sharded Sparse Data Parallelism materializes expert parameters on the fly with SparseAllGather and SparseReduceScatter, avoiding the overhead of expert rearrangement in MoE training.

  2. A Training-Memory Regression in MLA Sequence Parallelism: Why Megatron-Core Forbids Absorption, and LAGA -- a Communication-Efficient Fix

    cs.DC 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LAGA replaces MLA training's per-head K/V all-to-all with a latent all-gather and local up-projection, matching explicit-form memory while cutting collective communication ~1.98x.

  3. ThAME: 3D Memory-Enabled Heterogeneous Accelerator for LLM Mixture of Experts

    cs.AR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    ThAME, a 3D FeFET-NAND + DRAM heterogeneous accelerator with an MOO-optimized hierarchical NoC, claims up to 15.7× per-token latency and 9.8× energy gains for MoE LLM inference in cycle-accurate simulation.

  4. Communication-Aware Placement and Pruning for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Inference

    cs.DC 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Communication-aware expert placement plus device-level pruning yields 1.23–1.86× MoE inference throughput and better accuracy at equal speedup than load-balance or sequential baselines.

  5. Diagnosing Overhead in Dispatch Operations: Cross-architecture Observatory

    cs.DC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Expert-parallel scaling leaves per-expert routing imbalance flat; mock-token benchmarks overestimate real-text imbalance and fake a batch-size trend; architectures split into data-resilient (MHA, Mamba-2) and persiste...

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