For large LMs, people usually use tensor-parallelism (TP) or pipeline-parallelism (PP). TP involves lots of communication, but uses all GPUs 100% of the time and works faster. PP requires much less communication, but may keep some GPUs idle while they are waiting for data from others.
Usually, TP is used when you have good communication channels between GPUs (e.g., they are in one data center and connected with NVLink), while PP is used when communication is a bottleneck (like in Petals, where the data is sent over the Internet, which is much slower than NVLink).
For large LMs, people usually use tensor-parallelism (TP) or pipeline-parallelism (PP). TP involves lots of communication, but uses all GPUs 100% of the time and works faster. PP requires much less communication, but may keep some GPUs idle while they are waiting for data from others.
Usually, TP is used when you have good communication channels between GPUs (e.g., they are in one data center and connected with NVLink), while PP is used when communication is a bottleneck (like in Petals, where the data is sent over the Internet, which is much slower than NVLink).