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Megatron-LM

NVIDIA
open source / Overall score: 4.0(strong)

Megatron-LM trains transformer models across large GPU clusters, pairing pre-configured training scripts with Megatron Core, a composable library of GPU-optimized building blocks. Megatron Core supplies tensor, pipeline, data, expert, and context parallelism, mixed-precision training, and distributed checkpointing for teams building their own training frameworks. NVIDIA develops both in the open, alongside a Megatron Bridge converter for Hugging Face checkpoints.

This entry covers both components shipped from the NVIDIA/Megatron-LM repository, and the scores are read against that repository rather than the Megatron Core package alone.

Openness

5 high confidence
5.0
license
BSD-3-Clause(OSI, NVIDIA core)+Apache-2.0/MIT(OSI, vendored components)
source
public
core features withheld
no
restriction
attribution/change-notice only

BSD-3-Clause for NVIDIA's own code and Apache-2.0 or MIT for vendored components, all OSI licenses, with the full source public. The only obligations are attribution and a notice of changes, and no functionality is held back for a paid tier.

  • https://developer.nvidia.com/megatron-core recorded 2026-09-16

    Redirects to developer.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-x-libraries/megatron-core. NVIDIA's own product page presents a single library — "NVIDIA Megatron Core is a composable training library for large-scale generative AI" — with exactly two calls to action, "Go to GitHub" and "Get Started", and no purchase, subscription, enterprise-edition or contact-sales path anywhere on it. Every feature block (parallelism techniques, customizable building blocks, scalability and training resiliency, MoE, hybrid models, multimodal training) links into the public repository or the public API documentation, and the page describes Megatron-LM as an open-source training reference framework for exploring Megatron Core. The vendor's own marketing withholds nothing from the published source.

  • https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/0e/0d/765e06a494ec67a2641e282ea7663713a9c290d67951dc5066d12a87c999/megatron_core-0.18.2.tar.gz recorded 2026-09-16

    The published sdist, walked with Python's tarfile: 585 members, 490 of them regular files, 479 under megatron/ plus megatron_core.egg-info, MANIFEST.in, PKG-INFO, README.md, pyproject.toml, setup.cfg and setup.py. Every capability NVIDIA's product page advertises ships in it — megatron/core/tensor_parallel (8 files), pipeline_parallel (9), transformer/moe (13), dist_checkpointing (22), fp8_utils.py, post_training (10) and inference (87 regular files). I then read the decoded bytes of all 490 files and ran case-insensitive regex searches across them: 0 files matched 'enterprise', 0 matched 'license[_ -]?key|entitlement|activation[_ -]?code', 0 matched 'premium|paid tier|commercial edition|pro edition', 0 matched 'contact sales', 0 matched 'AI Enterprise'. Nothing in the shipped package gates a feature behind a paid tier.

  • https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM recorded 2026-08-08

    The rendered README states the repository contains two components: Megatron-LM, which "is a reference example that includes Megatron Core plus pre-configured training scripts", and Megatron Core, which "is a composable library with GPU-optimized building blocks for custom training frameworks". Getting Started offers both "Install from PyPI: uv pip install megatron-core" and a clone of this repository followed by "uv pip install -e .", so the thing you run builds from the published source. A dated news entry reads "[2025/12] Megatron Core development has moved to GitHub." with "All development and CI now happen in the open, and community contributions are welcome." The top-level file listing is .agents, .github, .gitlab, docker, docs, examples, experimental/agent_compose, images, megatron, scripts, skills, tasks, tests, tools plus root files — no enterprise, commercial or paid-edition directory. Sidebar shows 17.4k stars, 4.3k forks, 9,435 commits.

  • https://pypi.org/project/megatron-core/ recorded 2026-09-16

    Project page headed "megatron-core 0.18.2", Author/Maintainer "NVIDIA", License "BSD License (Apache 2.0)", classifier "OSI Approved :: BSD License", Released "Jul 21, 2026", Requires Python >=3.12, 5 maintainers. The Provides-Extra list is training, mlm, dev, lts, te, ssm — pip extras, not tiers. The library is published to a public index under an OSI license, which is what makes source:public true for the artifact people actually install.

  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM/main/LICENSE recorded 2026-09-16

    Opens "The following applies to all files unless otherwise noted:" followed by a 2019-2025 NVIDIA CORPORATION copyright and the three BSD-3-Clause conditions — retain the copyright notice in source, reproduce it in binary distributions, and "Neither the name of NVIDIA CORPORATION nor the names of its" contributors may be used to endorse derived products. Below that, section headers grant vendored code separate terms: "-- LICENSE FOR Facebook, huggingface, Google Research, LLaVA, Mamba, TinyZero and vLLM code --" under the Apache License Version 2.0, whose clause 4(b) requires modified files to carry notices "stating that You changed the files", plus two MIT License sections (one for Facebook/Meta/Microsoft/OpenGVLab-InternVL/Triton/DeepSeek, one for Thinking Machines Lab). BSD-3-Clause for the NVIDIA core with Apache-2.0 and MIT vendored components, all OSI, and the only obligations are attribution, no-endorsement and change notices.

  • https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/products/ai-enterprise/ recorded 2026-09-16

    NVIDIA's paid-suite page. It describes AI Enterprise as bringing together "microservices, frameworks, and libraries for AI development with advanced GPU orchestration and infrastructure management in a fully supported, production-ready, commercial software suite" whose pitch is to "Deploy leading open source tools and AI models with confidence" - support and packaging around open source rather than functionality withheld from it. A case-insensitive grep for 'megatron' over the saved 675KB body returns 0 matches, so NVIDIA's commercial suite does not claim any Megatron capability of its own.

Adoption

3 high confidence
3.0

Adoption is measured by PyPI downloads of megatron-core, the package this repository builds; Megatron-LM also underlies other training libraries such as Colossal-AI, Accelerate and NeMo. Its users are concentrated among large-model training teams, a much smaller population than inference tooling reaches, so downloads reflect specialist rather than mass use.

  • https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM recorded 2026-08-08

    Corroborating only, and the reason the download figure is a floor rather than the whole picture: the repository sidebar reads 17.4k stars, 4.3k forks, 9,435 commits, 377 open issues and 740 open pull requests, and Getting Started documents installing from a clone as an alternative to PyPI, so source-tree users are not counted by pypistats. This supersedes the recorded "16.6k stars".

  • https://pypi.org/project/megatron-core/ recorded 2026-08-08

    Confirms the package the download figure belongs to is the product's own: "megatron-core 0.18.2", Author/Maintainer "NVIDIA", Released "Jul 21, 2026", 5 maintainers listed (chtruong, eharper, jaredcasper, ko3n1g, svcnvidia-nemo-ci). Actively released, so the monthly figure is current traffic rather than residue.

  • https://pypistats.org/api/packages/megatron-core/recent recorded 2026-08-08

    The whole body is {"data":{"last_day":15416,"last_month":223175,"last_week":65951},"package":"megatron-core","type":"recent_downloads"}: 223,175 downloads in the last month for the megatron-core package.

Capability

5 high confidence
5.0

Megatron-LM provides reference-grade infrastructure for large-scale transformer training, composing data, tensor, pipeline, context and expert parallelism with mixed precision down to FP8 and FP4. NVIDIA's own benchmarks reach 462B parameters across thousands of H100 GPUs, though those results were measured without training to convergence.

  • https://developer.nvidia.com/megatron-core recorded 2026-09-28

    NVIDIA product page: "Megatron Core demonstrates superlinear scaling up to 6144 H100 GPUs" on GPT models from 2 billion to 462 billion parameters, and "near linear scaling from 96 to 4608 H100 GPUs" for a 177 billion parameter GPT-3 model. Feature text lists "automatic restart, fault/hang detection" resiliency and "FP8 mixed precision and advanced parallelism".

  • https://docs.nvidia.com/megatron-core/developer-guide/latest/user-guide/parallelism-guide.html recorded 2026-09-28

    The Parallelism Strategies Guide opens "Megatron Core supports multiple parallelism strategies that can be combined to efficiently train models from billions to tr" and its overview table lists Fully-Sharded Data Parallelism (Megatron-FSDP) alongside data, tensor, pipeline, context and expert parallelism; the flag "--sequence-parallel" is documented as required when combining TP with EP.

  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-28

    The README describes Megatron Core as providing "transformer building blocks, advanced parallelism strategies (TP, PP, DP, EP, and CP), mixed precision support (FP16, BF16, FP8, and FP4)". Under Performance Benchmarking: "The codebase efficiently trains models from 2B to 462B parameters across thousands of GPUs", and "Successfully benchmarked 462B parameter model training." on 6,144 H100 GPUs; the strong-scaling test takes "from 96 H100 GPUs to 4,608 GPUs" on a GPT-3 model of slightly more than 175 billion parameters.

Verified 2026-09-16