about
Scalable Training of Mixture-of-Experts Models with Megatron Core (arxiv.org)
2 points by matt_d 208 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Mixture-of-Experts models use only a few experts per word, so they can grow huge cheaply, but memory, data movement, and compute fight each other. This open-source training toolkit tunes all three together, reaching 1,233 TFLOPS per GPU on a 685-billion-parameter model.

Abstract

Scaling Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training introduces systems challenges absent in dense models. Because each token activates only a subset of experts, this sparsity allows total parameters to grow much faster than per-token computation, creating coupled constraints across memory, communication, and computation. Optimizing one dimension often shifts pressure to another, demanding co-design across the full system stack. We address these challenges for MoE training through integrated optimizations spanning memory (fine-grained recomputation, offloading, etc.), communication (optimized dispatchers, overlapping, etc.), and computation (Grouped GEMM, fusions, CUDA Graphs, etc.). The framework also provides Parallel Folding for flexible multi-dimensional parallelism, low-precision training support for FP8 and NVFP4, and efficient long-context training. On NVIDIA GB300 and GB200, it achieves 1,233/1,048 TFLOPS/GPU for DeepSeek-V3-685B and 974/919 TFLOPS/GPU for Qwen3-235B. As a performant, scalable, and production-ready open-source solution, it has been used across academia and industry for training MoE models ranging from billions to trillions of parameters on clusters scaling up to thousands of GPUs. This report explains how these techniques work, their trade-offs, and their interactions at the systems level, providing practical guidance for scaling MoE models with Megatron Core.

Zijie Yan, Hongxiao Bai, Xin Yao, Dennis Liu, Tong Liu, Hongbin Liu, Pingtian Li, Evan Wu, Shiqing Fan, Li Tao, Robin Zhang, Yuzhong Wang, et al.
arXiv:2603.07685 · cs.DC, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Mar 8, 2026 · updated Mar 10, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Technical Report. 88 pages. 42 figures

add comment on HN