Piper

Piper: Programmable distributed training system decoupling parallelism strategy from runtime

Researchers present Piper, a distributed training system that separates parallelism strategy specification from low-level runtime execution via an intermediate representation (IR) — a unified global training DAG. Users declare strategies through model annotations and scheduling directives, which Piper compiles into per-device execution plans. The system matches performance on standard strategies like ZeRO while enabling additional gains through joint compute-communication scheduling in composed strategies such as DeepSeek-V3's DualPipe.