[Megatron](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08053.pdf) is a large, powerful transformer developed by the Applied Deep Learning Research team at NVIDIA. This repository is for ongoing research on training large transformer language models at scale. We developed efficient, model-parallel, and multinode training of [GPT-2](https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf) and [BERT](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805.pdf) using mixed precision.
Our codebase is capable of efficiently training a 72-layer, 8.3 billion parameter GPT-2 language model with 8-way model and 64-way data parallelism across 512 GPUs. We sustain 15.1 PetaFLOPs across the entire application with 76% scaling efficiency when compared to a strong single GPU baseline that sustains 39 TeraFLOPs, which is 30% of peak theoritical FLOPs. Using our GPT-2 model we achieve SOTA results on the WikiText-103 (10.8 compared to SOTA perplexity of 15.8) and LAMBADA (66.5% compared to SOTA accuracy of 63.2%) datasets.
Our codebase is capable of efficiently training a 72-layer, 8.3 billion parameter GPT-2 language model with 8-way model and 64-way data parallelism across 512 GPUs. We sustain 15.1 PetaFLOPs across the entire application with 76% scaling efficiency when compared to a strong single GPU baseline that sustains 39 TeraFLOPs, which is 30% of peak theoretical FLOPs. Using our GPT-2 model we achieve SOTA results on the WikiText-103 (10.8 compared to SOTA perplexity of 15.8) and LAMBADA (66.5% compared to SOTA accuracy of 63.2%) datasets.
For BERT training, we swapped the position of the layer normalization and the residual connection in the model architecture (similar to GPT-2 architucture), which allowed the models to continue to improve as they were scaled up. Our BERT models with 3.9 billion parameters reaches a loss of 1.16, SQuAD 2.0 F1-score of 91.7, and RACE accuracy of 90.9%.
For BERT training, we swapped the position of the layer normalization and the residual connection in the model architecture (similar to GPT-2 architucture), which allowed the models to continue to improve as they were scaled up. Our BERT models with 3.9 billion parameters reach a loss of 1.16, SQuAD 2.0 F1-score of 91.7, and RACE accuracy of 90.9%.
