TRANSOM: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant System for Training LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, represented by chatGPT, have achieved profound impact on various fields. However, training LLMs with super-large-scale parameters requires large high-performance GPU clusters and long training periods lasting for months. Due to the inevitable hardware and software failures in large-scale clusters, maintaining uninterrupted and long-duration training is extremely challenging. As a result, A substantial amount of training time is devoted to task checkpoint saving and loading, task rescheduling and restart, and task manual anomaly checks, which greatly harms the overall training efficiency. To address these issues, we propose TRANSOM, a novel fault-tolerant LLM training system. In this work, we design three key subsystems: the training pipeline automatic fault tolerance and recovery mechanism named Transom Operator and Launcher (TOL), the training task multi-dimensional metric automatic anomaly detection system named Transom Eagle Eye (TEE), and the training checkpoint asynchronous access automatic fault tolerance and recovery technology named Transom Checkpoint Engine (TCE). Here, TOL manages the lifecycle of training tasks, while TEE is responsible for task monitoring and anomaly reporting. TEE detects training anomalies and reports them to TOL, who automatically enters the fault tolerance strategy to eliminate abnormal nodes and restart the training task. And the asynchronous checkpoint saving and loading functionality provided by TCE greatly shorten the fault tolerance overhead. The experimental results indicate that TRANSOM significantly enhances the efficiency of large-scale LLM training on clusters. Specifically, the pre-training time for GPT3-175B has been reduced by 28%, while checkpoint saving and loading performance have improved by a factor of 20.

Transaction Fraud Detection Using GRU-centered Sandwich-structured Model

Rapid growth of modern technologies such as internet and mobile computing are bringing dramatically increased e-commerce payments, as well as the explosion in transaction fraud. Meanwhile, fraudsters are continually refining their tricks, making rule-based fraud detection systems difficult to handle the ever-changing fraud patterns. Many data mining and artificial intelligence methods have been proposed for identifying small anomalies in large transaction data sets, increasing detecting efficiency to some extent. Nevertheless, there is always a contradiction that most methods are irrelevant to transaction sequence, yet sequence-related methods usually cannot learn information at single-transaction level well. In this paper, a new "within->between->within" sandwich-structured sequence learning architecture has been proposed by stacking an ensemble method, a deep sequential learning method and another top-layer ensemble classifier in proper order. Moreover, attention mechanism has also been introduced in to further improve performance. Models in this structure have been manifested to be very efficient in scenarios like fraud detection, where the information sequence is made up of vectors with complex interconnected features.