Category: Deep Learning
-
GPU Mode: CUTLASS and FlashAttention-3
In this GPU Mode lecture, Jay Shah presents his joint work on FlashAttention-3 and how to implement the main compute loop in the algorithm using CUTLASS. The code discussed in this lecture can be found at this commit in the FlashAttention-3 codebase. Note: Slides adapted from a talk given by Tri Dao. Go to article…
-
Epilogue Fusion in CUTLASS with Epilogue Visitor Trees
Welcome to a supplemental article for our tutorial series on GEMM (GEneral Matrix Multiplication). Posts in the main series (1, 2) have discussed performant implementations of GEMM on NVIDIA GPUs by looking at the mainloop, the part responsible for the actual GEMM computation. But the mainloop is only a part of the CUTLASS workload. In… Go to article…
-
FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision
In this blogpost, we describe three main techniques that we use to speed up attention on Hopper GPUs in FlashAttention-3: exploiting asynchrony of the Tensor Cores and TMA to (1) overlap overall computation and data movement via warp-specialization and (2) interleave block-wise matmul and softmax operations, and (3) incoherent processing that leverages hardware support for… Go to article…
-
Delivering 1 PFLOP/s of Performance with FP8 FlashAttention-2
We recently released an update to our FlashAttention-2 forward pass implementation on NVIDIA Hopper™ architecture that incorporates a number of new optimizations and improvements, including a software pipelining scheme and FP8 support. In this article, we will explain a challenge with achieving layout conformance of register fragments for WGMMA instructions that we encountered in the… Go to article…
-
A note on the algebra of CuTe Layouts
The core abstraction of NVIDIA’s CUTLASS library for high-performance linear algebra is the CuTe Layout. In this technical note, we give a rigorous, mathematical treatment of the algebra of these layouts and certain layout operations. Currently, the main goal is to lay down conditions for when the operations of complementation, composition, and logical division are… Go to article…
-
A Case Study in CUDA Kernel Fusion: Implementing FlashAttention-2 on NVIDIA Hopper Architecture using the CUTLASS Library
We provide an optimized implementation of the forward pass of FlashAttention-2, a popular memory-aware scaled dot-product attention algorithm, as a custom fused CUDA® kernel targeting NVIDIA Hopper™ architecture and written using the open-source CUTLASS library. In doing so, we explain the challenges and techniques involved in fusing online-softmax with back-to-back GEMM kernels, utilizing the Hopper-specific… Go to article…
-
Developing CUDA Kernels for GEMM on NVIDIA Hopper Architecture using CUTLASS
We explain how to develop NVIDIA CUDA® kernels for optimized general matrix multiplication (GEMM) on NVIDIA Hopper™ architecture using the template collection CUTLASS and its core library CuTe. Our main contribution is to provide an implementation of a GEMM kernel that uses the Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) and Warp Group Matrix-Multiply-Accumulate (WGMMA) operations introduced with… Go to article…