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LLMOps & ProductionMedium· MoE· Load Balancing· Distributed Training

Explain the difference between expert-level and device-...

Expert-level balancing uses the fi * Pi structure to penalize routing concentration at the individual expert level, ensuring that all experts are utilized. Device-level balancing applies a similar Fd * Pd structure at the GPU level to prevent network congestion. These two objectives are distinct and can conflict; for example, you might have balanced expert usage, but if all the most frequently used experts are hosted on the same GPU, you will still experience device-level communication bottlenecks.

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