MCCL: Measurement-based Collective Communication Library

Networking and Internet ArchitectureDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Summary

The gist is being written…

Authors

Michele Ferrero, Gabriele Castellano, Paolo Medagliani, Sebastien Martin, Roberto Morabito, Massimo Gallo

Abstract

Collective communication is a critical performance bottleneck in large-scale distributed training. Existing libraries and synthesis frameworks compute open-loop schedules once, assuming a static topology and peak link capacities. In production, however, persistent gray failures can silently degrade link throughput and latency for hours, causing pre-computed schedules to lose much of their efficiency during execution. In this paper, we present Measurement-based Collective Communication Library (MCCL), a collective communication library that closes the loop between runtime network measurement and dynamic schedule synthesis. MCCL passively measures GPU-to-GPU throughput, detects persistent degradation, re-synthesizes the affected communication-intensive schedules with warm-started synthesizers, and hot-swaps them without interrupting training. We validate the complete loop on a multi-node hardware prototype and use simulations to evaluate cluster-scale scenarios. In our experiments, MCCL incurs negligible overhead (<2%) while maintaining high measurement accuracy (<1.2% error) and low schedule hot-swap time (about 12 ms). Notably, under gray failures, MCCL reduces training time by up to 4.99x over static schedules on simulated training workloads for state-of-the-art LLMs such as Llama and DeepSeek.