Singh, SiddarthRuwase, OlatunjiAwan, Ammar AhmadRajbhandari, SamyamHe, YuxiongBhatele, AbhinavMixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a neural network architecture that adds sparsely activated expert blocks to a base model, increasing the number of parameters without impacting computational costs. However, current distributed deep learning frameworks are limited in their ability to train high-quality MoE models with large base models. In this work, we present DeepSpeed-TED, a novel, threedimensional, hybrid parallel algorithm that combines data, tensor, and expert parallelism to enable the training of MoE models with 4–8× larger base models than the current state-of-the-art. We also describe memory optimizations in the optimizer step, and communication optimizations that eliminate unnecessary data movement. We implement our approach in DeepSpeed and achieve speedups of 26% over a baseline (i.e. without our communication optimizations) when training a 40 billion parameter MoE model (6.7 billion base model with 16 experts) on 128 V100 GPUs.en-USparallel deep learningmixture-of-expertstensor parellelismexpert parallelismArticle