POD-Attention: Unlocking Full Prefill-Decode Overlap for Faster LLM Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kamath, Aditya K, Prabhu, Ramya, Mohan, Jayashree, Peter, Simon, Ramjee, Ramachandran, Panwar, Ashish
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Kamath, Aditya K
Prabhu, Ramya
Mohan, Jayashree
Peter, Simon
Ramjee, Ramachandran
Panwar, Ashish
author_facet Kamath, Aditya K
Prabhu, Ramya
Mohan, Jayashree
Peter, Simon
Ramjee, Ramachandran
Panwar, Ashish
contents Each request in LLM inference goes through two phases: compute-bound prefill and memory-bandwidth-bound decode. To improve GPU utilization, recent systems use hybrid batching that combines the prefill and decode phases of different requests into the same batch. This approach optimizes linear operations but remains inefficient for attention computation because existing attention kernels specialize execution independently for the prefill and decode phases. In this paper, we present POD-Attention - the first GPU kernel that efficiently computes attention for hybrid batches. POD-Attention aims to maximize the utilization of both compute and memory bandwidth by carefully allocating the GPU's resources such that prefill and decode operations happen concurrently on the same multiprocessor. POD-Attention speeds up attention computation by up to $59\%$ (mean $28\%$), enabling higher throughput and lower latency LLM inference compared to the use of independently optimized prefill and decode attention kernels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18038
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle POD-Attention: Unlocking Full Prefill-Decode Overlap for Faster LLM Inference
Kamath, Aditya K
Prabhu, Ramya
Mohan, Jayashree
Peter, Simon
Ramjee, Ramachandran
Panwar, Ashish
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
I.2.7; C.1.4
Each request in LLM inference goes through two phases: compute-bound prefill and memory-bandwidth-bound decode. To improve GPU utilization, recent systems use hybrid batching that combines the prefill and decode phases of different requests into the same batch. This approach optimizes linear operations but remains inefficient for attention computation because existing attention kernels specialize execution independently for the prefill and decode phases. In this paper, we present POD-Attention - the first GPU kernel that efficiently computes attention for hybrid batches. POD-Attention aims to maximize the utilization of both compute and memory bandwidth by carefully allocating the GPU's resources such that prefill and decode operations happen concurrently on the same multiprocessor. POD-Attention speeds up attention computation by up to $59\%$ (mean $28\%$), enabling higher throughput and lower latency LLM inference compared to the use of independently optimized prefill and decode attention kernels.
title POD-Attention: Unlocking Full Prefill-Decode Overlap for Faster LLM Inference
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
I.2.7; C.1.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18038