Recent work in unsupervised feature learning and deep learning has shown that be- ing able to train large models can dramatically improve performance. In this paper, we consider the problem of training a deep network with billions of parameters using tens of thousands of CPU cores. We have developed a software framework called DistBelief that can utilize computing clusters with thousands of machines to train large models. Within this framework, we have developed two algorithms for large-scale distributed training: (i) Downpour SGD, an asynchronous stochastic gradient descent procedure supporting a large number of model replicas, and (ii) Sandblaster, a framework that supports a variety of distributed batch optimization procedures, including a distributed implementation of L-BFGS. Downpour SGD and Sandblaster L-BFGS both increase the scale and speed of deep network train- ing. We have successfully used our system to train a deep network 30x larger than previously reported in the literature, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet, a visual object recognition task with 16 million images and 21k cate- gories. We show that these same techniques dramatically accelerate the training of a more modestly- sized deep network for a commercial speech recognition ser- vice. Although we focus on and report performance of these methods as applied to training large neural networks, the underlying algorithms are applicable to any gradient-based machine learning algorithm.