DualPipe

DualPipe is a bidirectional pipeline parallelism algorithm open-sourced by DeepSeek, introduced in their DeepSeek-V3 technical framework. The main goal of DualPipe is to maximize overlap between computation and communication phases during distributed training, thus reducing idle GPU time (i.e. “pipeline bubbles”) and improving cluster efficiency. Traditional pipeline parallelism methods (e.g. 1F1B or staggered pipelining) leave gaps because forward and backward phases can’t fully overlap with communication. DualPipe addresses that by scheduling micro-batches from both ends of the pipeline in a bidirectional fashion—i.e. some micro-batches flow forward while others flow backward—so that computation on one partition can coincide with communication for another.