# HAPMoE: Heterogeneity-Aware Automatic Parallelism Planning for Mixture-of-Experts Models Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39350/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Efficient MoE training and inference systems, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Efficient MoE training and inference systems](https://mlsanity.com/moe/efficient-moe-training-and-inference-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09368/) (2022)
- [DeepSpeed-MoE: Advancing Mixture-of-Experts Inference and Training to Power Next-Generation AI Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05596/) (2022)
- [Tutel: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03382/) (2022)
- [Beyond Data and Model Parallelism for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05358/) (2018)
- [Galvatron: Efficient Transformer Training over Multiple GPUs Using Automatic Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13878/) (2022)
- [Comet: Fine-grained Computation-communication Overlapping for Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19811/) (2025)
- [Shortcut-connected Expert Parallelism for Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05019/) (2024)
- [MegaScale-MoE: Large-Scale Communication-Efficient Training of Mixture-of-Experts Models in Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11432/) (2025)
- [Tesseract: Parallelize the Tensor Parallelism Efficiently](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14500/) (2021)
- [HeterPS: Distributed Deep Learning With Reinforcement Learning Based Scheduling in Heterogeneous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10635/) (2021)
- [AMP: Automatically Finding Model Parallel Strategies with Heterogeneity Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07297/) (2022)
- [Sailor: Automating Distributed Training over Dynamic, Heterogeneous, and Geo-distributed Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17096/) (2025)
- [Merak: An Efficient Distributed DNN Training Framework with Automated 3D Parallelism for Giant Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04959/) (2022)
- [Prediction Is All MoE Needs: Expert Load Distribution Goes from Fluctuating to Stabilizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16914/) (2024)
- [Model Parallelism on Distributed Infrastructure: A Literature Review from Theory to LLM Case-Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03699/) (2024)
- [HeterMoE: Efficient Training of Mixture-of-Experts Models on Heterogeneous GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03871/) (2025)
- [DCP: Addressing Input Dynamism In Long-Context Training via Dynamic Context Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10620/) (2025)
- [OmniLearn: A Framework for Distributed Deep Learning over Heterogeneous Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17469/) (2025)
- [SYMI: Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Training via Model and Optimizer State Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19925/) (2025)
- [Holmes: Towards Distributed Training Across Clusters with Heterogeneous NIC Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03549/) (2023)
- [Cephalo: Harnessing Heterogeneous GPU Clusters for Training Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01075/) (2024)
- [X-MoE: Enabling Scalable Training for Emerging Mixture-of-Experts Architectures on HPC Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13337/) (2025)
- [Poplar: Efficient Scaling of Distributed DNN Training on Heterogeneous GPU Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12596/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As model sizes continue to scale, distributed training has become inevitable. Automatic parallelization techniques can derive efficient training parallelism strategies at low cost while achieving superior performance. The difficulty of this problem is jointly determined by the complexity of the model and the underlying compute cluster. Meanwhile, mixture-of-experts (MoE) models are increasingly emerging as the dominant architecture and the rapid evolution of accelerator hardware has made cluster heterogeneity commonplace, posing substantial challenges to automatic parallelization. However, existing approaches typically target either MoE architectures or heterogeneous clusters, failing to generalize to scenarios where both challenges coexist. To this end, we present HAPMoE, a heterogeneity-aware automatic parallelism planner for MoE training. HAPMoE builds a lightweight MoE-aware cost model and efficiently searches a six-dimensional parallel space, producing parallel plans directly deployable on Megatron-LM. Experiments show that HAPMoE improves end-to-end training throughput by up to 3.2× over baselines across heterogeneous clusters. Its non-uniform pipeline partitioning yields an additional up to 78% gains, and its pruning-enhanced dynamic programming algorithm completes the search within 1 minute, demonstrating high efficiency and practical value in complex hardware environments.
