HLAT: High-quality large language model pre-trained on AWS Trainium

Getting large language models (LLMs) to perform well on the downstream tasks requires pre-training over trillions of tokens. This typically demands a large number of powerful computational devices in addition to a stable distributed training framework to accelerate the training. The growing number of applications leveraging AI/ML led to a scarcity of the expensive conventional accelerators (such as GPUs), which emphasizes the need for the alternative specialized-accelerators that are scalable and cost-efficient. AWS Trainium is the second-generation machine learning accelerator purposely built for training large deep learning models. However, training LLMs with billions of parameters on AWS Trainium is challenging due to its relatively nascent software ecosystem. In this paper, we showcase HLAT: a family of 7B and 70B decoder-only LLMs pre-trained using 4096 AWS Trainium accelerators over 1.8 trillion tokens. The performance of HLAT is benchmarked against popular open source models including LLaMA and OpenLLaMA, which have been trained on NVIDIA GPUs and Google TPUs, respectively. On various evaluation tasks, we show that HLAT achieves model quality on par with the baselines of similar model size. We also open-source all the training scripts and configurations of HLAT1 and share the best practice of using the NeuronX Distributed Training (NxDT), a customized distributed training library for AWS Trainium. Our work demonstrates that AWS Trainium powered by NxDT is able to successfully pre-train state-of-the-art LLM models with high performance and cost-effectiveness.