parallelism, and can be fully implemented with the insertion of a few communication operations in native PyTorch. We
illustrate this approach by converging transformer based models up to 8.3 billion parameters using 512 GPUs. We sustain
15.1 PetaFLOPs across the entire application with 76% scaling efficiency when compared to a strong single GPU baseline
that sustains 39 TeraFLOPs, which is 30% of peak FLOPs. To demonstrate that large language models can further advance
the state of the art (SOTA), we train an 8.3 billion parameter transformer language model similar to GPT-2 and a 3.9
billion parameter model similar to BERT. We show that careful attention to the placement of layer normalization in
BERT-like models is critical to achieving increased performance as the model size grows. Using the GPT-2 model we
