Sharing a Fabric with Collective Communication: Two Storage Penalties in Deep Learning Training

📅 2026-09-06
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了分布式深度学习训练中网络共享导致的存储延迟问题,通过使用节点本地NVMe暂存(DYAD)方法消除了数据加载停滞和通信竞争。
📝 Abstract
Distributed DL training on HPC systems often shares one network fabric between NCCL/RCCL collective communication and parallel-filesystem I/O. Using a real GNN training workload on a Slingshot-11 system, we show that this sharing imposes two distinct costs. The primary cost is heavy-tailed DataLoader stalls: the typical DataLoader wait is just 15 ms at steady state, yet spikes to multiple seconds in 28% of Lustre iterations and 12% of VAST iterations. The secondary cost is traffic-class contention on collective communication: Lustre I/O stalls the all-reduce by up to 145$\times$ in an isolated benchmark. The two costs arise from different mechanisms. I/O stall latency affects any storage path that traverses the shared fabric, whereas all-reduce network contention occurs only when storage and collective communication share the same traffic class. Their common root cause is that storage I/O traverses the shared fabric. This work shows that node-local NVMe staging via DYAD (Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/flux-framework/dyad) eliminates both effects by keeping storage I/O off that path. Across a full training epoch, DYAD achieves a 7.4 times speedup over direct Lustre reads and a 1.06 times speedup over VAST. By the second epoch, once the local cache is fully warmed, DataLoader stalls are eliminated entirely, allowing DYAD to reach a 1.31 times speedup over VAST.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Distributed DL Training
Network Fabric Sharing
DataLoader Latency
Traffic-Class Contention
Storage I/O
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

node-local NVMe staging
DYAD
shared fabric
DataLoader stalls
collective communication
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