CCCL: Node-Spanning GPU Collectives with CXL Memory Pooling
For distributed LLM training/inference, CCCL demonstrates a viable alternative to RDMA-based networking using CXL memory pooling, reducing hardware costs while improving performance.
CCCL leverages CXL shared memory pooling to enable cross-node GPU collective operations without RDMA, achieving up to 1.94x speedup over InfiniBand and 1.11x LLM training speedup with 2.75x hardware cost reduction.
Large language models (LLMs) training or inference across multiple nodes introduces significant pressure on GPU memory and interconnect bandwidth. The Compute Express Link (CXL) shared memory pool offers a scalable solution by enabling memory sharing across nodes, reducing over-provisioning and improving resource utilization. We propose \name, a collective communication library, leveraging the CXL shared memory pool to support cross-node GPU operations without relying on traditional RDMA-based networking. Our design addresses the challenges on synchronization, data interleaving, and communication parallelization faced by using the CXL shared memory pool for collective communications. Evaluating on multiple nodes with a TITAN-II CXL switch and six Micron CZ120 memory cards, we show that \name achieves highly efficient collective operations across hosts, demonstrating CXL's potential for scalable, memory-centric GPU communication. Our evaluation demonstrates that \name achieves average performance improvements of 1.34$\times$ for AllGather, 1.84$\times$ for Broadcast, 1.94$\times$ for Gather, and 1.04$\times$ for Scatter, compared to the original RDMA-based implementation over 200 Gbps InfiniBand. \textcolor{dong}{In addition, the evaluation with a case of LLM training shows 1.11$\times$ speedup compared with the InfiniBand while saving production cost by $2.75\times$ in hardware.}