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ATTENTION2D: Communication Efficient Distributed Self-Attention Mechanism

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Venmugil Elango

Outline

In this paper, we present ATTENTION2D, a novel method that leverages parallel processing along both query and key/value dimensions to address the computational and memory overhead of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer-based models. ATTENTION2D achieves relatively fast training and inference speedups compared to existing methods without using approximations or incurring additional computational or memory overhead, and it scales effectively on many processing units. Experimental results using a GPT-3-like model show up to 5x and 9.4x performance improvements over Ring Attention on multiple NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
We present a novel method to effectively solve the computational cost problem of the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer model.
Dramatically improves training and inference speed compared to existing methods.
Ensures efficient scalability even across multiple processing units.
Contributes to improving the efficiency of training and deploying large-scale language models.
Limitations:
The experimental results presented here are limited to a specific hardware environment (NVIDIA A100, H100 GPU). Performance on other hardware environments should be verified through additional experiments.
Since the results of this experiment were conducted on a model similar to GPT-3, the generalizability to other types of Transformer models should be further confirmed.
There is a lack of specific quantitative analysis of the "asymptotically faster" mentioned in the paper. The actual performance improvement may vary depending on model size, data size, hardware specifications, etc.
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