TA-MoE: Topology-Aware Large Scale Mixture-of-Expert Training
Main Conference Track
Authors: Chang Chen, Min Li, Zhihua Wu, Dianhai Yu, Chao Yang

Sparsely gated Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) has demonstrated its effectiveness in scaling up deep neural networks to an extreme scale. Despite that numerous efforts have been made to improve the performance of MoE from the model design or system optimization perspective, existing MoE dispatch patterns are still not able to fully exploit the underlying heterogeneous network environments. In this paper, we propose TA-MoE, a topology-aware routing strategy for large-scale MoE trainging, from a model-system co-design perspective, which can dynamically adjust the MoE dispatch pattern according to the network topology. Based on communication modeling, we abstract the dispatch problem into an optimization objective and obtain the approximate dispatch pattern under different topologies. On top of that, we design a topology-aware auxiliary loss, which can adaptively route the data to fit in the underlying topology without sacrificing the model accuracy. Experiments show that TA-MoE can substantially outperform its counterparts on various hardware and model configurations, with roughly 1.01x-1.61x, 1.01x-4.77x, 1.25x-1.54x improvements over the popular DeepSpeed-MoE, FastMoE and FasterMoE systems.