Optimizing Frequent Checkpointing via Low-Cost Differential for Distributed Training Systems

Abstract

Distributed training of large deep-learning models often leads to failures, so checkpointing is commonly employed for recovery. State-of-the-art studies focus on frequent checkpointing for fast recovery from failures. However, frequent checkpointing generates numerous checkpoints, incurring substantial costs and thus degrading training performance. Recently, differential checkpointing has been proposed to reduce costs, but it is limited to recommendation systems, so its application to general distributed training systems remains unexplored. In this paper, we find that gradients generated during distributed training can be reused to construct differential checkpoints, while the former's size is smaller than the latter's, motivating us to reuse gradients for low-cost differential checkpointing. Based on this main idea, we propose \sysname, a frequent checkpointing framework for compression-enabled training systems that reuses compressed gradients as differential checkpoints, eliminating redundant differential computation and reducing checkpoint transmission cost. Furthermore, we extend gradient reuse to scenarios without gradient compression and propose \sysnameplus, which employs layer-wise-reuse snapshotting and incremental-merging persistence to overlap checkpointing with training execution. Experiments on diverse workloads, including billion-parameter-scale models, demonstrate that \sysname and \sysnameplus significantly reduce checkpointing overhead and enable checkpointing at frequencies as high as once per iteration, reducing training time by up to 89.2\% and 81.2\%, respectively.