Comprehensive Deadlock Prevention for GPU Collective Communication

Abstract

Distributed deep neural network training necessitates efficient GPU collective communications, which are inherently susceptible to deadlocks. GPU collective deadlocks arise easily in distributed deep learning applications when multiple collectives circularly wait for each other. GPU collective deadlocks pose a significant challenge to the correct functioning and efficiency of distributed deep learning, and no general effective solutions are currently available. Only in specific scenarios, ad-hoc methods, making an application invoke collectives in a consistent order across GPUs, can be used to prevent circular collective dependency and deadlocks. This paper presents DFCCL, a novel GPU collective communication library that provides a comprehensive approach for GPU collective deadlock prevention while maintaining high performance. DFCCL achieves preemption for GPU collectives at the bottom library level, effectively preventing deadlocks even if applications cause circular collective dependency. DFCCL ensures high performance with its execution and scheduling methods for collectives. Experiments show that DFCCL effectively prevents GPU collective deadlocks in various situations. Moreover, extensive evaluations demonstrate that DFCCL delivers performance comparable to or superior to NCCL, the state-of-the-art collective communication library highly optimized for NVIDIA GPUs.