Mesh-TensorFlow generalizes hand-built tensor slicing by letting engineers map tensor axes onto device-mesh dimensions. section 6.3.3
Choosing axes to shard
Sharding the batch gives data parallelism; sharding vocabulary or feed-forward dimensions gives tensor parallelism; sharding a mixture-of-experts model’s expert dimension gives expert parallelism. section 6.3.3
Pipeline parallelism splits computation stages rather than tensor axes, but belongs to the broader mesh family. section 6.3.3
