DeepSpeed
DeepSpeed is a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training and inference easy, efficient, and effective. (by deepspeedai)
fairscale
PyTorch extensions for high performance and large scale training. (by facebookresearch)
| DeepSpeed | fairscale | |
|---|---|---|
| 52 | 6 | |
| 38,430 | 3,315 | |
| 1.9% | 1.0% | |
| 9.7 | 3.0 | |
| 2 days ago | 24 days ago | |
| Python | Python | |
| Apache License 2.0 | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
DeepSpeed
Posts with mentions or reviews of DeepSpeed.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-06.
- DeepSpeed-Domino: Communication-Free LLM Training Engine
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Can we discuss MLOps, Deployment, Optimizations, and Speed?
DeepSpeed can handle parallelism concerns, and even offload data/model to RAM, or even NVMe (!?) . I'm surprised I don't see this project used more.
- [P][D] A100 is much slower than expected at low batch size for text generation
- DeepSpeed-FastGen: High-Throughput for LLMs via MII and DeepSpeed-Inference
- DeepSpeed-FastGen: High-Throughput Text Generation for LLMs
- Why async gradient update doesn't get popular in LLM community?
- DeepSpeed Ulysses: System Optimizations for Enabling Training of Extreme Long Sequence Transformer Models (r/MachineLearning)
- [P] DeepSpeed Ulysses: System Optimizations for Enabling Training of Extreme Long Sequence Transformer Models
- A comprehensive guide to running Llama 2 locally
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Microsoft Research proposes new framework, LongMem, allowing for unlimited context length along with reduced GPU memory usage and faster inference speed. Code will be open-sourced
And https://github.com/microsoft/deepspeed
fairscale
Posts with mentions or reviews of fairscale.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-27.
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[R] TorchScale: Transformers at Scale - Microsoft 2022 Shuming Ma et al - Improves modeling generality and capability, as well as training stability and efficiency.
I skimmed through the README and paper. What does this library have that that hasn't been included in xformers or fairscale?
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[D] DeepSpeed vs PyTorch native API
Things are slowly moving into PyTorch upstream such as the ZeRO redundancy optimizer but from my experience the team behind DeepSpeed just move faster. There is also fairscale from the FAIR team which seems to be a staging ground for experimental optimizations before they move into PyTorch. If you use Lightning, it's easy enough to try out these various libraries (docs here)
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How to Train Large Models on Many GPUs?
DeepSpeed [1] is amazing tool to enable the different kind of parallelisms and optimizations on your model. I would definitely not recommend reimplementing everything yourself.
Probably FairScale [2] too, but never tried it myself.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed
[2]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairscale
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[P] PyTorch Lightning Multi-GPU Training Visualization using minGPT, from 250 Million to 4+ Billion Parameters
It was helpful for me to see how DeepSpeed/FairScale stack up compared to vanilla PyTorch Distributed Training specifically when trying to reach larger parameter sizes, visualizing the trade off with throughput. A lot of the learnings ended up in the Lightning Documentation under the advanced GPU docs!
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[D] Training 10x Larger Models and Accelerating Training with ZeRO-Offloading
I created a feature request on the FairScale project so that we can track the progress on the integration: Support ZeRO-Offload · Issue #337 · facebookresearch/fairscale (github.com)
What are some alternatives?
When comparing DeepSpeed and fairscale you can also consider the following projects:
unsloth - Finetune Qwen3, Llama 4, TTS, DeepSeek-R1 & Gemma 3 LLMs 2x faster with 70% less memory! 🦥
Megatron-DeepSpeed - Ongoing research training transformer language models at scale, including: BERT & GPT-2
Megatron-LM - Ongoing research training transformer models at scale
ColossalAI - Making large AI models cheaper, faster and more accessible
torchscale - Foundation Architecture for (M)LLMs