CCL-D: A High-Precision Diagnostic System for Slow and Hang Anomalies in Large-Scale Model Training

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Authors: Yida Gu, Fakang Wang, Jianhao Fu, Zhenhang Sun, Qianyu Zhang, Hairui Zhao, Xingchen Liu, Yang Tian, Wenjing Huang, Zedong Liu, Yifan Chen, J. Y. Yang
+8 more Yueyuan Zhou, Qian ZHAO, Haoxu Li, Tao Wang, Yu Feng, Zhan Wang, Guangming Tan, Dingwen Tao
Cited by: 0
References: 20

Abstract

As training scales grow, collective communication libraries (CCL) increasingly face anomalies arising from complex interactions among hardware, software, and environmental factors. These anomalies typically manifest as slow/hang communication, the most frequent and time-consuming category to diagnose. However, traditional diagnostic methods remain inaccurate and inefficient, frequently requiring hours or even days for root cause analysis. To address this, we propose CCL-D, a high-precision diagnostic system designed to detect and locate slow/hang anomalies in large-scale distributed training. CCL-D integrates a rank-level real-time probe with an intelligent decision analyzer. The probe measures cross-layer anomaly metrics using a lightweight distributed tracing framework to monitor communication traffic. The analyzer performs automated anomaly detection and root-cause location, precisely identifying the faulty GPU rank. Deployed on a 4,000-GPU cluster over one year, CCL-D achieved near-complete coverage of known slow/hang anomalies and pinpointed affected ranks within 6 minutes—substantially outperforming existing solutions.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Software System Performance and Reliability Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques Distributed systems and fault tolerance

Publication details

Journal / source
ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
Pages
425–438
Publication date
28 January 2026