Microsoft

Distributed Training & Advanced Application

Microsoft

Distributed Training & Advanced Application

 Microsoft

Instructor: Microsoft

Access provided by University of Naples Federico II

Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

1 week to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace
Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

1 week to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

What you'll learn

  • Build PyTorch DDP and FSDP pipelines for multi-node distributed training, profiling communication overhead, and scaling GPU throughput.

  • Configure DeepSpeed ZeRO optimization stages and apply Microsoft Olive and Azure Container for PyTorch to accelerate large model training.

  • Build computer vision and NLP pipelines for object detection, NER, classification, and QA using Florence-2, CLIP, and Hugging Face Transformers.

  • Design multimodal fusion architectures combining vision, text, and audio using Microsoft Phi-4 and OpenAI Whisper on Azure ML.

Details to know

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Assessments

25 assignments¹

AI Graded see disclaimer
Taught in English

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Build your Machine Learning expertise

This course is part of the Microsoft Deep Learning Engineering with Azure Professional Certificate
When you enroll in this course, you'll also be enrolled in this Professional Certificate.
  • Learn new concepts from industry experts
  • Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
  • Develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects
  • Earn a shareable career certificate from Microsoft

There are 11 modules in this course

Transition from single-GPU prototypes to parallelized cluster workloads by configuring process groups, managing gradient synchronization, and orchestrating scalable runs using the NCCL backend.

What's included

1 video2 readings2 assignments

Overcome the physical memory limits of a single GPU by learning how FSDP shards model parameters, gradients, and optimizer states across your cluster using Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) primitives, balancing memory reduction against collective network communication overhead.

What's included

3 readings3 assignments

Master Microsoft's Zero Redundancy Optimizer by configuring ZeRO stages 1, 2, and 3, implementing CPU offloading parameters, and writing autotuning scripts to generate optimal configuration payloads.

What's included

1 video2 readings2 assignments

Integrate Microsoft's enterprise acceleration tools by applying Microsoft Olive optimization passes, configuring NCCL communications, and running workloads within the curated ACP environment.

What's included

3 readings3 assignments

Transition from image-level categorization to precise spatial localization. This module covers the architectural differences between regression-based and transformer-based detectors, fine-tuning a YOLOv11 model on custom datasets, and analyzing performance metrics.

What's included

1 video3 readings1 assignment

Bridge the gap between visual features and natural language processing. This module covers implementing zero-shot classification and image captioning using Florence-2 and CLIP, enforcing strict API credential hygiene, and orchestrating fallbacks for production-grade reliability.

What's included

3 readings3 assignments

Master the fine-tuning of foundation language models for specialized downstream tasks. You will learn to write custom data collators, configure evaluation metrics, and implement fine-tuning loops using the Hugging Face Trainer API.

What's included

1 video2 readings2 assignments

Design cost-effective, high-performance hybrid NLP solutions. You will learn to partition tasks between custom fine-tuned transformer models and out-of-the-box cloud services, optimizing your deployment pipelines for operational cost and latency.

What's included

3 readings3 assignments

Align and merge diverse datatypes. Learners construct joint vector spaces where text, images, and audio represent shared concepts, and implement early, late, and cross-attention fusion layers to combine multimodal features.

What's included

1 video2 readings2 assignments

Deploy state-of-the-art native tri-modal systems. Learners study Microsoft Phi-4 Multimodal architecture (including its unified vision/speech encoders and Mixture-of-LoRAs framework), evaluate its native speech-to-text efficiency relative to traditional pipelines like OpenAI Whisper, and manage unified multimodal pipelines on Azure ML.

What's included

3 readings3 assignments

Synthesize your distributed training and model acceleration skills to scale a massive transformer model across a multi-GPU, multi-node cloud cluster. You will write a Python training script that implements Microsoft DeepSpeed ZeRO-3 parameter sharding and activation checkpointing, paired with a DeepSpeed configuration file implementing ZeRO-3 CPU offloading. You will then write the Azure ML SDK v2 code to submit this job to a remote compute cluster using the curated ACP environment and optimized NCCL environment variables.

What's included

2 readings1 assignment

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Instructor

 Microsoft
446 Courses2,923,374 learners

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Microsoft

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¹ Some assignments in this course are AI-graded. For these assignments, your data will be used in accordance with Coursera's Privacy Notice.