LLMQ: Efficient Lower-Precision Pretraining for Consumer GPUs

Erik Schultheis; Dan Alistarh

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2512.15306

LLMQ: Efficient Lower-Precision Pretraining for Consumer GPUs

Erik Schultheis·Dan Alistarh

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We present LLMQ, an end-to-end CUDA/C++ implementation for medium-sized language-model training, e.g. 3B to 32B parameters, on affordable, commodity GPUs. These devices are characterized by low memory availability and slow communication compared to datacentre-grade GPUs. Consequently, we showcase a range of optimizations that target these bottlenecks, including activation checkpointing, offloading, and copy-engine based collectives. LLMQ is able to train or fine-tune a 7B model on a single 16GB mid-range gaming card, or a 32B model on a workstation equipped with 4 RTX 4090s. This is achieved while executing a standard 8-bit training pipeline, without additional algorithmic approximations, and maintaining FLOP utilization of around 50%. The efficiency of LLMQ rivals that of production-scale systems on much more expensive cloud-grade GPUs.

Explore related subjects

cs.DC cs.LG

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Erik Schultheis, Dan Alistarh. 2025-12-17. LLMQ: Efficient Lower-Precision Pretraining for Consumer GPUs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15306

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

The HEAL Data Platform

Objective: The objective was to develop a cloud-based, federated system to serve as a single point of search, discovery and analysis for data generated under the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative. Materials and methods: The HEAL Data Platform is built on the open source Gen3 platform, utilizing a small set of framework services and exposed APIs to interoperate with both NIH and non-NIH data repositories. Framework services include those for authentication and authorization, creating persistent identifiers for data objects, and adding and updating metadata. Results: The HEAL Data Platform serves as a single point of discovery of over one thousand studies funded under the HEAL Initiative. With hundreds of users per month, the HEAL Data Platform provides rich metadata and currently interoperates with nineteen data repositories and commons to provide access to shared datasets. Secure, cloud-based compute environments that are integrated with STRIDES facilitate secondary analysis of HEAL data. Discussion: Studies funded under the HEAL Initiative generate a wide variety of data types, which are deposited across multiple NIH and third-party data repositories. The mesh architecture of the HEAL Data Platform provides a single point of discovery of these data resources, accelerating and facilitating secondary use. Conclusion: The HEAL Data Platform enables search, discovery, and analysis of data that are deposited in connected data repositories and commons. By ensuring that these data are fully Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR), the HEAL Data Platform maximizes the value of data generated under the HEAL Initiative.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Weave: Fine-Grained Dynamic SM Scheduling in an MoE Megakernel for Compute-Communication Overlap

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference under expert parallelism (EP) turns each MoE layer into a distributed computation with costly dispatch and combine communication. State-of-the-art systems reduce this cost through communication-computation overlap, splitting the GPU's SMs for communication and computation respectively. However, this approach still leaves GPU resources wasted along two dimensions. Spatially, the best SM split is determined by each layer's routing result and varies across layers and GPUs, so fixed policies mismatch the workload and waste either NVLink bandwidth or compute throughput. Temporally, complex MoE data dependencies introduce bubbles that leave SMs idle. We present Weave, to our knowledge the first MoE overlap system that performs fine-grained dynamic SM scheduling - deciding per layer and per GPU by routing results at runtime. Once routing completes, each layer's communication and computation volumes become known; Weave exploits this predictability through a lightweight cost model running inside the persistent megakernel: a spatial scheduler partitions SMs into communication workers and computation workers to match the communication/computation throughput ratio, and a temporal scheduler coordinates the two worker groups to minimize SM idleness. On 4x H100 SXM GPUs across six mainstream MoE models, Weave achieves a 2.89x geometric-mean MoE-layer speedup and a 1.33x geometric-mean end-to-end speedup over five state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

pytest-gpu-proof: Enabling Cloud-CPU Continuous Integration for GPU Code with Local GPU Attestation

GPU acceleration is now routine across robotics, but cloud-hosted GPU continuous integration (CI) runners are expensive, resulting in severe under-testing of GPU-accelerated code. We present pytest-gpu-proof, an open-source pytest plugin offering a practical middle ground. Tests can be run on a local machine, signed with a receipt of exactly what ran and what it produced, and integrated into standard CPU CI workflows (e.g., GitHub Actions). The tool is open source and on PyPI, and we are actively integrating it across our lab's software stack.

cs.DC↗