How FP8 boosts LLM training by 18% on Amazon SageMaker P5 instances

Large language models (LLMs) are AI systems trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to understand, generate, and reason with natural language in highly capable and flexible ways. LLM training has seen remarkable advances in recent years, with organizations pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in terms of model size, performance, and efficiency. In this post, we explore how FP8 optimization can significantly speed up large model training on Amazon SageMaker P5 instances.

LLM training using SageMaker P5

In 2023, SageMaker announced P5 instances, which support up to eight of the latest NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Equipped with high-bandwidth networking technologies like EFA, P5 instances provide a powerful platform for distributed training, enabling large models to be trained in parallel across multiple nodes. With the use of Amazon SageMaker Model Training, organizations have been able to achieve higher training speeds and efficiency by turning to P5 ...