Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07866v2
• Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2025 07:47:04 GMT
• Title: Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs
• Authors: Yichun Yin, Wenyong Huang, Kaikai Song, Yehui Tang, Xueyu Wu, Wei Guo, Peng Guo, Yaoyuan Wang, Xiaojun Meng, Yasheng Wang, Dong Li, Can Chen, Dandan Tu, Yin Li, Fisher Yu, Ruiming Tang, Yunhe Wang, Baojun Wang, Bin Wang, Bo Wang, Boxiao Liu, Changzheng Zhang, Duyu Tang, Fei Mi, Hui Jin, Jiansheng Wei, Jiarui Qin, Jinpeng Li, Jun Zhao, Liqun Deng, Lin Li, Minghui Xu, Naifu Zhang, Nianzu Zheng, Qiang Li, Rongju Ruan, Shengjun Cheng, Tianyu Guo, Wei He, Wei Li, Weiwen Liu, Wulong Liu, Xinyi Dai, Yonghan Dong, Yu Pan, Yue Li, Yufei Wang, Yujun Li, Yunsheng Ni, Zhe Liu, Zhenhe Zhang, Zhicheng Liu,
• Abstract summary: We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs)<n>To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations.<n>Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters.
• Score: 123.25404278506585
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.

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