Training at Scale

Layer 2 · Mechanics

Training at Scale

ZeRO's three stages, tensor and pipeline parallelism mechanically, collectives, and how 3D parallelism combines all of it.

11 min read70 XP

Data parallel, mechanically

  1. Each GPU: forward+backward

    on its own micro-batch

  2. All-reduce gradients

    average across GPUs

  3. Each GPU: optimizer step

    identical update, independently

DDP in three steps. Every GPU ends the step with identical weights.
Go deeper: L3 Code