Deep learning models can be distributed across a cluster to speed up training time and handle large datasets. Deeplearning4j is an open-source deep learning library for Java that runs on Spark, allowing models to be trained in a distributed fashion across a Spark cluster. Training a model involves distributing stochastic gradient descent (SGD) across nodes, with the key challenge being efficient all-reduce communication between nodes. Engineering high performance distributed training, such as with parameter servers, is important to reduce bottlenecks.