NITRO: LLM Inference on Intel Laptop NPUs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fei, Anthony, Abdelfattah, Mohamed S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Fei, Anthony
Abdelfattah, Mohamed S.
author_facet Fei, Anthony
Abdelfattah, Mohamed S.
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential tools in natural language processing, finding large usage in chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and are a central area of research. A particular area of interest includes designing hardware specialized for these AI applications, with one such example being the neural processing unit (NPU). In 2023, Intel released the Intel Core Ultra processor with codename Meteor Lake, featuring a CPU, GPU, and NPU system-on-chip. However, official software support for the NPU through Intel's OpenVINO framework is limited to static model inference. The dynamic nature of autoregressive token generation in LLMs is therefore not supported out of the box. To address this shortcoming, we present NITRO (NPU Inference for Transformers Optimization), a Python-based framework built on top of OpenVINO to support text and chat generation on NPUs. In this paper, we discuss in detail the key modifications made to the transformer architecture to enable inference, some performance benchmarks, and future steps towards improving the package. The code repository for NITRO can be found here: https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/nitro.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_11053
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NITRO: LLM Inference on Intel Laptop NPUs
Fei, Anthony
Abdelfattah, Mohamed S.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential tools in natural language processing, finding large usage in chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and are a central area of research. A particular area of interest includes designing hardware specialized for these AI applications, with one such example being the neural processing unit (NPU). In 2023, Intel released the Intel Core Ultra processor with codename Meteor Lake, featuring a CPU, GPU, and NPU system-on-chip. However, official software support for the NPU through Intel's OpenVINO framework is limited to static model inference. The dynamic nature of autoregressive token generation in LLMs is therefore not supported out of the box. To address this shortcoming, we present NITRO (NPU Inference for Transformers Optimization), a Python-based framework built on top of OpenVINO to support text and chat generation on NPUs. In this paper, we discuss in detail the key modifications made to the transformer architecture to enable inference, some performance benchmarks, and future steps towards improving the package. The code repository for NITRO can be found here: https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/nitro.
title NITRO: LLM Inference on Intel Laptop NPUs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11053