MLOps & Infrastructure · advanced · concept 145 of 176
Distributed Training
Training models across multiple GPUs or machines. Essential for frontier models, which are trained on clusters ranging from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand accelerators. Techniques: data parallelism, model parallelism, pipeline parallelism. Gradient accumulation fakes bigger batches on small GPUs, and checkpointing is what lets thousand-GPU runs survive hardware failures.
Key terms
Data parallelismModel parallelismFSDPDeepSpeedGradient syncGradient accumulationCheckpointing
Learn these first
Videos
▶ Stanford CS231N | Spring 2025 | Lecture 11: Large Scale Distributed Training ↗
Stanford Online · YouTube
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