The groundbreaking Transformer acceleration technology FlashAttention-3 has been launched! This is not just an upgrade; it heralds a direct increase in the inference speed of our Large Language Models (LLMs) and a direct decrease in costs!
Let's talk about FlashAttention-3 first, which is a significant improvement over its predecessors:
Significant increase in GPU utilization: Training and running large language models with FlashAttention-3 doubles the speed, up to 1.5 to 2 times faster, and this efficiency is fantastic!
Low precision, high performance: It can also run using low-precision numbers (FP8) while maintaining accuracy, which means what? Lower costs with no compromise on performance!
Handling long texts is a breeze: FlashAttention-3 greatly enhances the AI model's ability to process long texts, which was unimaginable before.
FlashAttention is an open-source library developed by Dao-AILab, based on two significant papers, providing optimized implementations for attention mechanisms in deep learning models. This library is particularly suitable for processing large datasets and long sequences, with memory consumption and sequence length in linear relationship, which is much more efficient than the traditional quadratic relationship.
Technical Highlights:
Advanced technology support: Local attention, deterministic backpropagation, ALiBi, and other technologies enhance the model's expressiveness and flexibility to a new level.
Hopper GPU optimization: FlashAttention-3 is specially optimized for Hopper GPU support, with performance improvements that are more than just marginal.
Easy installation and use: Supported by CUDA 11.6 and PyTorch 1.12 and above, FlashAttention-3 can be easily installed using pip on Linux systems. Although Windows users may need to test more, it is definitely worth a try.
Core Functions:
High-performance: Optimized algorithms significantly reduce computational and memory requirements, especially for long sequence data processing, with performance improvements that are visible to the naked eye.
Memory optimization: Compared to traditional methods, FlashAttention has lower memory consumption, and the linear relationship eliminates memory usage as a concern.
Advanced features: Integrated with a variety of advanced technologies, significantly enhancing model performance and application scope.
Usability and compatibility: With simple installation and usage guides, as well as support for multiple GPU architectures, FlashAttention-3 can be quickly integrated into various projects.
Project address: https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention