Distributed Inference and Fine-tuning of Large Language Models Over The
  Internet
Authors: name: Alexander Borzunov, name: Max Ryabinin, name: Artem Chumachenko, name: Dmitry Baranchuk, name: Tim Dettmers, name: Younes Belkada, name: Pavel Samygin, name: Colin Raffel

Large language models (LLMs) are useful in many NLP tasks and become more
capable with size, with the best open-source models having over 50 billion
parameters. However, using these 50B+ models requires high-end hardware, making
them inaccessible to most researchers. In this work, we investigate methods for
cost-efficient inference and fine-tuning of LLMs, comparing local and
distributed strategies. We observe that a large enough model (50B+) can run
efficiently even on geodistributed devices in a consumer-grade network. This
could allow running LLM efficiently by pooling together idle compute resources
of multiple research groups and volunteers. We address two open problems: (1)
how to perform inference and fine-tuning reliably if any device can disconnect
abruptly and (2) how to partition LLMs between devices with uneven hardware,
joining and leaving at will. In order to do that, we develop special
fault-tolerant inference algorithms and load-balancing protocols that
automatically assign devices to maximize the total system throughput. We
showcase these algorithms in Petals - a decentralized system that runs Llama 2
(70B) and BLOOM (176B) over the Internet up to 10x faster than offloading for
interactive generation. We evaluate the performance of our system in simulated
conditions and a real-world setup spanning two continents.