BatchWeave: A Consistent Object-Store-Native Data Plane for Large Foundation Model Training

TL;DR

BatchWeave introduces a novel object-store-native data plane for large foundation model training, enabling consistent, failure-isolated, and high-throughput data management tailored for distributed training environments.

Contribution

It proposes the Transactional Global Batch and Decentralized Adaptive Commit algorithms, enhancing consistency, recovery, and throughput in large-scale distributed training data pipelines.

Findings

Outperforms colocated dataloaders in throughput with failure isolation.

Achieves higher ingestion throughput than Apache Kafka.

Provides lower consumer read latency compared to Kafka.

Abstract

Modern Large Foundation Model (LFM) training has transformed the data pipeline from a static ingestion layer into a dynamic component that must co-evolve with the training process. Existing systems are ill-equipped: colocated dataloaders offer no failure isolation, while message queue-based disaggregated dataloaders operate on a record/offset abstraction that cannot express the batch-level semantics required by distributed training. We present BatchWeave, an object-store-native training data plane for distributed LFM training. BatchWeave uses versioned manifests and conditional object writes to coordinate batch publication, recovery, and lifecycle management. First, it introduces the Transactional Global Batch (TGB), which builds on versioned-manifest ACID storage semantics and extends them with training-specific consistency, including atomic all-rank batch visibility, a globally ordered step sequence, checkpoint-aligned lifecycle management, and end-to-end exactly-once recovery. Second, it realizes recovery and retention directly in the storage layer, by durably persisting producer state through the commit protocol and tying reclamation to distributed checkpoint state. Third, its Decentralized Adaptive Commit (DAC) algorithm sustains stable ingestion throughput as the manifest grows, without any inter-producer communication. Evaluations on large-scale multimodal pre-training and SFT workloads using 64 GPUs show that BatchWeave outperforms colocated dataloader throughput while providing full failure isolation, outperforms Apache Kafka in ingestion throughput, and achieves lower consumer read latency than Kafka.