Zhipeng Tu

Zhuoshan Zhou, Chen Zhang, Shuyi Zhang et al.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is crucial for scaling large language models, but its scalability is severely limited by inter-GPU communication bottlenecks in multi-GPU systems. Although overlapping communication with computation is a widely recognized optimization, its effective deployment still remains challenging, both in terms of performance and programmability. In this work, we identify the root cause as a fundamental abstraction mismatch between MoE's dynamic, irregular token-to-expert mapping and the static, address-centric communication model of modern GPUs, which necessitates a complex software mediation phase to resolve addresses before data transfers, limiting performance and software flexibility. To resolve this, we propose MoE-Hub, a hardware-software co-design that introduces a destination-agnostic communication paradigm. MoE-Hub decouples data transmission from address management, allowing producers to send data immediately after routing using only a logical destination, while address allocation and data-flow orchestration are handled transparently by lightweight hardware in the GPU hub. By hardware-accelerating the entire communication control plane, MoE-Hub enables seamless and transparent overlap. Our evaluation shows that MoE-Hub achieves 1.40x-3.08x per-layer and 1.21x-1.98x end-to-end speedup over state-of-the-art systems.

Chen Zhang, Qijun Zhang, Zhuoshan Zhou et al.

Tensor parallelism (TP) in large-scale LLM inference and training introduces frequent collective operations that dominate inter-GPU communication. While in-switch computing, exemplified by NVLink SHARP (NVLS), accelerates collective operations by reducing redundant data transfer, its communication-centric design philosophy introduces the mismatch between its communication mode and the memory semantic requirement of LLM's computation kernel. Such a mismatch isolates the compute and communication phases, resulting in underutilized resources and limited overlap in multi-GPU systems. To address the limitation, we propose CAIS, the first Compute-Aware In-Switch computing framework that aligns communication modes with computation's memory semantics requirement. CAIS consists of three integral techniques: (1) compute-aware ISA and microarchitecture extension to enable compute-aware in-switch computing. (2) merging-aware TB (Thread Block) coordination to improve the temporal alignment for efficient request merging. (3) graph-level dataflow optimizer to achieve a tight cross-kernel overlap. Evaluations on LLM workloads show that CAIS achieves 1.38$\times$ average end-to-end training speedup over the SOTA NVLS-enabled solution, and 1.61$\times$ over T3, the SOTA compute-communicate overlap solutions but do not leverage NVLS, demonstrating its effectiveness in accelerating TP on multi-GPU systems.

Qijun Zhang, Chen Zhang, Zhuoshan Zhou et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has been adopted by many leading large models to reduce computational requirements. However, frequent inter-GPU communication in MoE expert parallelism (EP) becomes a performance challenge. We observe substantial redundant inter-GPU data transfers in MoE that can be potentially addressed by in-switch computing. Unfortunately, the existing solution, NVLink SHARP (NVLS), can only support static collectives with regular patterns, incapable of dynamic communication with irregular patterns in MoE. To bridge the functionality gap, we propose DySHARP, an integral dynamic in-switch computing solution to accelerate MoE, encompassing both communication primitives and communication-aware scheduling: 1) Dynamic multimem addressing co-designs ISA, architecture, and runtime, as a dynamic extension to NVLS, reducing redundant traffic. However, the resulting traffic reduction is inherently asymmetric between two directions, preventing it from directly translating into speedup. 2) Token-centric kernel fusion deeply fuses the dispatch-computation-combine pipeline, resolving this asymmetry to translate traffic reduction into actual speedup. Compared with the state-of-the-art solution, DySHARP achieves up to 1.79$\times$ speedup.

Yehui Tang, Yichun Yin, Yaoyuan Wang et al.

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.