Efficient Large Models Fine-tuning on Commodity Servers via Memory-balanced Pipeline Parallelism

Yujie Liu, Zhiquan Lai, Weijie Liu, Wei Wang, Dongsheng Li

Abstract: Large models have achieved impressive performance in many downstream tasks. Using pipeline parallelism to fine-tune large models on commodity GPU servers is an important way to make the excellent performance of large models available to the general public. Previous solutions fail to achieve an efficient memory-balanced pipeline parallelism. In this poster, we introduce a memory load-balanced pipeline parallel solution. This solution balances memory consumption across stages on commodity GPU servers via NVLink bridges. It establishes a new pathway to offload data from GPU to CPU by using the PCIe link of adjacent GPUs connected by the NVLink bridge. Furthermore, our method orchestrates offload operations to minimize the offload latency during large model fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that our solution can balance the memory footprint among pipeline stages without sacrificing training performance.