Data movement limits to frontier model training

Abstract

We present a theoretical model of distributed training, and use it to analyze how far dense and sparse training runs can be scaled. Under our baseline assumptions, given a three month training duration, data movement bottlenecks begin to significantly lower hardware utilization for training runs exceeding about $10^{28}$ FLOP, two orders of magnitude above the largest training run to date, suggesting the arrival of fundamental barriers to scaling in three years given recent rates of growth. A training run exceeding about $10^{31}$ FLOP is infeasible even at low utilization. However, more aggressive batch size scaling and/or shorter and fatter model shapes, if achievable, have the potential to permit much larger training runs.