train_performance.md

Training Performance

InternLM deeply integrates Flash-Attention, Apex, and other high-performance model operators to improve training efficiency. It achieves efficient overlap of computation and communication, significantly reducing cross-node communication traffic during training by building the Hybrid Zero technique. InternLM supports expanding the 7B model from 8 GPUs to 1024 GPUs, with an acceleration efficiency of up to 90% at the thousand-card scale, a training throughput of over 180 TFLOPS, and an average of over 3600 tokens per GPU per second. The following table shows InternLM's scalability test data at different configurations:

GPU Number	8	16	32	64	128	256	512	1024
TGS (Tokens/GPU/Second)	4078	3939	3919	3944	3928	3920	3835	3625
TFLOPS	193	191	188	188	187	185	186	184

We tested the performance of training the 7B model in InternLM using various parallel configurations on a GPU cluster. In each test group, the number of tokens processed per GPU in a single iteration remained consistent. The hardware and parameter configurations used in the tests are shown in the table below:

Hardware	Model
GPU	nvidia_a100-sxm4-80gb
Memory	2TB
Inter-machine bandwidth	4 * 100Gb RoCE
CPU	128 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU

Hyperparameters	tp=1	tp=2
micro_num	4	4
micro_bsz	2	4
seq_len	2048	2048

The configuration of zero1 in InternLM determines the allocation range of optimizer states.

• zero1=-1 indicates that optimizer states are distributed across all data-parallel nodes (equivalent to Deepspeed Zero-1).
• In the case of zero1=8, tp=1, optimizer states are distributed within 8 GPUs in a single node, and the optimizer states remain consistent across different nodes.

Throughput Measurement

Throughput is defined as TGS, the average number of tokens processed per GPU per second. In this test, the training configuration had pack_sample_into_one=False and checkpoint=False. The test results are shown in the following table. When using zero1=8, tp=1, InternLM achieves an acceleration efficiency of 88% for training the 7B model with a thousand cards.

Parallel Configuration	8 GPUs	16 GPUs	32 GPUs	64 GPUs	128 GPUs	256 GPUs	512 GPUs	1024 GPUs
(tp=1, zero1=-1)	4062	3842	3752	3690	3571	3209	2861	2271
(tp=1, zero1=8)	4078	3939	3919	3944	3928	3920	3835	3625
(tp=2, zero1=-1)	3822	3595	3475	3438	3308	3094	2992	2785
(tp=2, zero1=4)	3761	3658	3655	3650	3651	3653	3589	3486

FLOPS Testing

The computational workload of model training is based on the FLOPS calculation method described in the Megatron paper. To ensure constant FLOPS during training, the test configuration had pack_sample_into_one=True, dtype=torch.bfloat16.

When Activation Ckpt is enabled，the test results are shown in the table below. InternLM can achieve >180 TFLOPS for 7B model training with 1024 GPUs.

• TGS: Tokens per GPU per Second

• Global Bsz: The total number of processed tokens with all GPUs in a step

TP	Zero1	Pack Sample Into One	Activation Ckpt	GPU Num	Seq Len	Micro Bsz	Micro Num	Global Bsz	TGS	TFLOPS
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	8	2048	8	1	0.125M	3314	193
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	16	2048	8	1	0.25M	3268	191
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	32	2048	8	1	0.5M	3323	188
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	64	2048	8	1	1M	3217	188
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	128	2048	8	1	2M	3260	187
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	256	2048	8	1	4M	3215	187
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	512	2048	8	1	8M	3199	186
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	1024	2048	8	1	16M	3163	184
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	512	2048	4	1	4M	2963	173
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	1024	2048	2	1	4M	2341	136
1	8	TRUE	TRUE	1024	2048	4	1	8M	2796	160

When Activation Ckpt is turned off, the test results are as shown in the table below:

TP	Zero1	Pack Sample Into One	Activation Ckpt	GPU Num	Seq Len	Micro Bsz	Micro Num	Global Bsz	TGS	TFLOPS
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	8	2048	2	4	0.125M	4103	183
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	16	2048	2	4	0.25M	3939	177
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	32	2048	2	4	0.5M	3919	176
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	64	2048	2	4	1M	3944	174
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	128	2048	2	4	2M	3928	173
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	256	2048	2	4	4M	3920	173
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	512	2048	2	4	8M	3900	173
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	1024	2048	2	4	16M	3625	160
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	512	2048	2	2	4M	3084	139
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	1024	2048	2	1	4M	2346	105
1	8	TRUE	FALSE	1024	2048	2	2	8M	2817	124