STADI: Fine-Grained Step-Patch Diffusion Parallelism for Heterogeneous GPUs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liang, Han, Zhou, Jiahui, Zhou, Zicheng, Zhang, Xiaoxi, Chen, Xu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liang, Han
Zhou, Jiahui
Zhou, Zicheng
Zhang, Xiaoxi
Chen, Xu
author_facet Liang, Han
Zhou, Jiahui
Zhou, Zicheng
Zhang, Xiaoxi
Chen, Xu
contents The escalating adoption of diffusion models for applications such as image generation demands efficient parallel inference techniques to manage their substantial computational cost. However, existing diffusion parallelism inference schemes often underutilize resources in heterogeneous multi-GPU environments, where varying hardware capabilities or background tasks cause workload imbalance. This paper introduces Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Diffusion Inference (STADI), a novel framework to accelerate diffusion model inference in such settings. At its core is a hybrid scheduler that orchestrates fine-grained parallelism across both temporal and spatial dimensions. Temporally, STADI introduces a novel computation-aware step allocator applied after warmup phases, using a least-common-multiple-minimizing quantization technique to reduce denoising steps on slower GPUs and execution synchronization. To further minimize GPU idle periods, STADI executes an elastic patch parallelism mechanism that allocates variably sized image patches to GPUs according to their computational capability, ensuring balanced workload distribution through a complementary spatial mechanism. Extensive experiments on both load-imbalanced and heterogeneous multi-GPU clusters validate STADI's efficacy, demonstrating improved load balancing and mitigation of performance bottlenecks. Compared to patch parallelism, a state-of-the-art diffusion inference framework, our method significantly reduces end-to-end inference latency by up to 45% and significantly improves resource utilization on heterogeneous GPUs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04719
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STADI: Fine-Grained Step-Patch Diffusion Parallelism for Heterogeneous GPUs
Liang, Han
Zhou, Jiahui
Zhou, Zicheng
Zhang, Xiaoxi
Chen, Xu
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The escalating adoption of diffusion models for applications such as image generation demands efficient parallel inference techniques to manage their substantial computational cost. However, existing diffusion parallelism inference schemes often underutilize resources in heterogeneous multi-GPU environments, where varying hardware capabilities or background tasks cause workload imbalance. This paper introduces Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Diffusion Inference (STADI), a novel framework to accelerate diffusion model inference in such settings. At its core is a hybrid scheduler that orchestrates fine-grained parallelism across both temporal and spatial dimensions. Temporally, STADI introduces a novel computation-aware step allocator applied after warmup phases, using a least-common-multiple-minimizing quantization technique to reduce denoising steps on slower GPUs and execution synchronization. To further minimize GPU idle periods, STADI executes an elastic patch parallelism mechanism that allocates variably sized image patches to GPUs according to their computational capability, ensuring balanced workload distribution through a complementary spatial mechanism. Extensive experiments on both load-imbalanced and heterogeneous multi-GPU clusters validate STADI's efficacy, demonstrating improved load balancing and mitigation of performance bottlenecks. Compared to patch parallelism, a state-of-the-art diffusion inference framework, our method significantly reduces end-to-end inference latency by up to 45% and significantly improves resource utilization on heterogeneous GPUs.
title STADI: Fine-Grained Step-Patch Diffusion Parallelism for Heterogeneous GPUs
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04719