BurstEngine: an Efficient Distributed Framework for Training Transformers on Extremely Long Sequences of over 1M Tokens

Existing methods for training LLMs on long-sequence data, such as Tensor Parallelism and Context Parallelism, exhibit low Model FLOPs Utilization as sequence lengths and number of GPUs increase, especially when sequence lengths exceed 1M tokens. To address these challenges, we propose BurstEngine, an efficient framework designed to train LLMs on long-sequence data. BurstEngine introduces BurstAttention, an optimized distributed attention with lower communication cost than RingAttention. BurstAttention leverages topology-aware ring communication to fully utilize network bandwidth and incorporates fine-grained communication-computation overlap. Furthermore, BurstEngine introduces sequence-level selective checkpointing and fuses the language modeling head with the loss function to reduce memory cost. Additionally, BurstEngine introduces workload balance optimization for various types of attention masking. By integrating these optimizations, BurstEngine achieves a $1.2\times$ speedup with much lower memory overhead than the state-of-the-art baselines when training LLMs on extremely long sequences of over 1M tokens. We have made our code publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/thunlp/BurstEngine.