Optimus-CC: Efficient Large NLP Model Training with 3D Parallelism Aware Communication Compression

Abstract

In training of modern large natural language processing (NLP) models, it has become a common practice to split models using 3D parallelism to multiple GPUs. Such technique, however, suffers from a high overhead of inter-node communication. Compressing the communication is one way to mitigate the overhead by reducing the inter-node traffic volume; however, the existing compression techniques have critical limitations to be applied for NLP models with 3D parallelism in that 1) only the data parallelism traffic is targeted, and 2) the existing compression schemes already harm the model quality too much.