Lazarus: Resilient and Elastic Training of Mixture-of-Experts Models with Adaptive Expert Placement

Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has increasingly been adopted to further scale large language models (LLMs) due to its sub-linear scaling for computation costs. However, frequent failures still pose significant challenges as training scales. The cost of even a single failure is significant, as all GPUs need to wait idle until the failure is resolved, potentially losing considerable training progress as training has to restart from checkpoints. Existing solutions for efficient fault-tolerant training either lack elasticity or rely on building resiliency into pipeline parallelism, which cannot be applied to MoE models due to the expert parallelism strategy adopted by the MoE architecture. We present Lazarus, a system for resilient and elastic training of MoE models. Lazarus adaptively allocates expert replicas to address the inherent imbalance in expert workload and speeds-up training, while a provably optimal expert placement algorithm is developed to maximize the probability of recovery upon failures. Through adaptive expert placement and a flexible token dispatcher, Lazarus can also fully utilize all available nodes after failures, leaving no GPU idle. Our evaluation shows that Lazarus outperforms existing MoE training systems by up to 5.7x under frequent node failures and 3.4x on a real spot instance trace.

PDD Graph: Bridging Electronic Medical Records and Biomedical Knowledge Graphs via Entity Linking

Electronic medical records contain multi-format electronic medical data that consist of an abundance of medical knowledge. Facing with patient's symptoms, experienced caregivers make right medical decisions based on their professional knowledge that accurately grasps relationships between symptoms, diagnosis and corresponding treatments. In this paper, we aim to capture these relationships by constructing a large and high-quality heterogenous graph linking patients, diseases, and drugs (PDD) in EMRs. Specifically, we propose a novel framework to extract important medical entities from MIMIC-III (Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III) and automatically link them with the existing biomedical knowledge graphs, including ICD-9 ontology and DrugBank. The PDD graph presented in this paper is accessible on the Web via the SPARQL endpoint, and provides a pathway for medical discovery and applications, such as effective treatment recommendations.