diff --git a/deepspeed/runtime/utils.py b/deepspeed/runtime/utils.py
index 72b6447da2fa..7024b93d6820 100755
--- a/deepspeed/runtime/utils.py
+++ b/deepspeed/runtime/utils.py
@@ -944,6 +944,10 @@ def all_gather_dp_groups(partitioned_param_groups, dp_process_group, start_align
         partition_id = dist.get_rank(group=dp_process_group[group_id])
         dp_world_size = dist.get_world_size(group=dp_process_group[group_id])
 
+        if dp_world_size == 1:
+            # no groups share optimizer states
+            # pipeline parallel with bf16 will default call this even if dp size = 1.
+            continue
         num_shards = max(1, partitioned_params[partition_id].numel() * dp_world_size // allgather_bucket_size)
 
         shard_size = partitioned_params[partition_id].numel() // num_shards