# HetCCL: Accelerating LLM Training with Heterogeneous GPUs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22585 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22585/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04473/) (2021)
- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [ZeRO-Offload: Democratizing Billion-Scale Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06840/) (2021)
- [Reducing Activation Recomputation in Large Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05198/) (2022)
- [ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07857/) (2021)
- [Accelerating Distributed MoE Training and Inference with Lina](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17223/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneity-Aware Cluster Scheduling Policies for Deep Learning Workloads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09213/) (2020)
- [A Hybrid Tensor-Expert-Data Parallelism Approach to Optimize Mixture-of-Experts Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06318/) (2023)
- [HetPipe: Enabling Large DNN Training on (Whimpy) Heterogeneous GPU Clusters through Integration of Pipelined Model Parallelism and Data Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14038/) (2020)
- [Characterization of Large Language Model Development in the Datacenter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07648/) (2024)
- [MegaScale-Infer: Serving Mixture-of-Experts at Scale with Disaggregated Expert Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02263/) (2025)
- [Demystifying NCCL: An In-depth Analysis of GPU Communication Protocols and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04786/) (2025)
- [AMP: Automatically Finding Model Parallel Strategies with Heterogeneity Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07297/) (2022)
- [An Extensible Software Transport Layer for GPU Networking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17307/) (2025)
- [Collective Communication for 100k+ GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20171/) (2025)
- [HetSeq: Distributed GPU Training on Heterogeneous Infrastructure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14783/) (2020)
- [HiCCL: A Hierarchical Collective Communication Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05962/) (2024)
- [Cephalo: Harnessing Heterogeneous GPU Clusters for Training Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01075/) (2024)
- [H2:Towards Efficient Large-Scale LLM Training on Hyper-Heterogeneous Cluster over 1,000 Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17548/) (2025)
- [KAITIAN: A Unified Communication Framework for Enabling Efficient Collaboration Across Heterogeneous Accelerators in Embodied AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10183/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Efficient Expert-Parallel Communication on PCIe-Connected Consumer GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid growth of large language models is driving organizations to expand their GPU clusters, often with GPUs from multiple vendors. However, current deep learning frameworks lack support for collective communication across heterogeneous GPUs, leading to inefficiency and higher costs. We present HetCCL, a collective communication library that unifies vendor-specific backends and enables RDMA-based communication across GPUs without requiring driver modifications. HetCCL introduces two novel mechanisms that enable cross-vendor communication while leveraging optimized vendor libraries, NVIDIA NCCL and AMD RCCL. Evaluations on a multi-vendor GPU cluster show that HetCCL matches NCCL and RCCL performance in homogeneous setups while uniquely scaling in heterogeneous environments, enabling practical, high-performance training with both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs without changes to existing deep learning applications.