​
Part One: An ELI5 introduction to "FlashAttention", a fast, IO-aware, memory-efficient mechanism, promising faster training times on longer sequences.

Unraveling FlashAttention
​A Leap Forward in Language Modeling

As I pondered the topic for my newsletter, the idea of explaining how the attention mechanism works immediately stood out. Indeed, when launching a new series, starting with the fundamentals is a wise strategy, and Large Language Models (LLMs) are the talk of the town.

However, the internet is already saturated with stories about attention—its mechanics, its efficacy, and its applications. So, if I want to keep you from snoozing before we even start, I have to find a unique perspective.

So, what if we explore the concept of attention from a different angle? Rather than discussing its benefits, we could examine its challenges and propose strategies to mitigate some of them.

With this approach in mind, my first series will focus on FlashAttention: a fast and memory-efficient exact Attention with IO-awareness. This description might seem overwhelming at first, but I'm confident everything will become clear by the end.

This series will follow our customary format: four parts, with one installment released each week. Thus, April is designated as FlashAttention Month!

The first part, which you're currently reading, serves as an ELI5 introduction to FlashAttention, outlining its motivation, significance, challenges in achieving similar outcomes with the traditional attention algorithm, and the core concept behind it.

The second installment delves into the mechanics of the attention mechanism (yes, it’s necessary, you can’t escape it). We will take this opportunity to implement everything from the ground up in PyTorch, allowing us to engage directly with the process and gain a deeper understanding. Additionally, we'll discuss the scalability challenges of the original attention algorithm.

In the third part, we will explore the GPU memory hierarchy in detail—a crucial component for grasping how FlashAttention achieves its efficiency. What is HBM, what is SRAM, and how we can make the most out of each component. I believe that this is one of the most interesting parts of this series.

Finally, the fourth and final part will see us revisiting FlashAttention, where we will re-implement the algorithm from scratch using PyTorch. In this post, I guarantee that everything will click into place, allowing you to confidently state that you understand what Attention is, how it functions, and how FlashAttention enhances it.

Let’s begin! 🚀️

The Quest for Deeper Understanding

Since we're at the starting line, we're going to pace ourselves—no need to sprint just yet. My goal is to gently unfold the story behind FlashAttention, peeling back the layers on why it's crucial yet challenging, all while keeping things lofty and light, using an ELI5 approach.

The drive to develop FlashAttention stems from the AI community's escalating ambition to process increasingly longer sequences of data. This pursuit is not merely academic curiosity, nor is it driven by a desire for creating bigger models and bigger GPUs, following the trend in the Big, Bigger, Biggest documentary.

The potential benefits of this capability are profound, offering a deeper understanding of complex texts such as books and instruction manuals. This parallels the improvements witnessed in computer vision by creating datasets of higher-resolution images.

Picture this: you're binge-watching your favorite show, but every time a new episode rolls in, your memory of the last one is as clear as mud. That’s a nightmare of a viewing experience! And let's be honest, the "previously on transformers" segment before every episode kicks off can only do so much before it feels like trying to solve a Rubik's cube in the dark.

So, what’s stopping us from training our LLMs on longer sequences and expanding their context windows to fit entire books? I’m glad you asked!

The Challenges of Scaling

The ambition to model longer sequences hits a towering wall: the attention mechanism, the very heart of the transformer architecture that powers today's LLMs, struggles to scale with increasing sequence lengths. Since every token in a sequence is trying to have a meaningful conversation with every other token, no matter how far apart they are, lengthening the sequence is like adding more guests to the party. It sounds fun until you realize you've got to chat with each one of them.

The issue is twofold; not only does the computational complexity of the attention mechanism increase quadratically with sequence length, but it is also hampered by inefficient memory utilization. Each doubling of sequence length quadruples the demand for reads and writes from the (relatively) slow High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) of GPUs (an unfortunate name), leading to a bottleneck that stifles scalability.

To formalize the previous sentence, we say that the arithmetic intensity of attention—defined as the ratio of arithmetic operations to memory access—is on the low side. While this bit of jargon might not be crucial for grasping the bigger picture, you can now use it in your conversations and sound smarter.

What’s the Idea?

Enter FlashAttention, a revolutionary approach designed to address these challenges head-on. By making the attention algorithm understand its environment, thus, making it I/O-aware, FlashAttention transforms the conventional method into a more memory-efficient, faster process.

The core idea is to minimize redundant HBM reads and writes by leveraging smarter data loading strategies, like dusting off the classic technique of tiling, and recomputing everything we need for the backward pass on the fly. Now, this sentence, coupled with the figure below, might be pushing you to the brink of throwing in the towel. But hang in there! By the time we reach the finale of this series, it'll all click into place, as satisfying as the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

But, even if you feel lost now, if you squint a bit at the last graph on the right, you can see that the attention mechanism spends the majority of its computation time on calculating things like Softmax and Dropout, while it rarely does any matrix multiplication. Since element-wise operations, like calculating the Softmax or zeroing out a bunch of activations through a Dropout layer, are mainly memory-bound, the whole attention operation is a memory-bound operation.

In other words, we're basically on standby mode, twiddling our thumbs while we wait for data to make the trek from the main memory and back again. That alone should give you an idea of what needs to happen to speed things up!

The Power of Tiling

At the heart of FlashAttention's strategy is the concept of tiling, which involves breaking down large matrices into smaller blocks. These blocks can be more efficiently processed in the GPU's SRAM, significantly speeding up computations.

Tiling allows the attention operation to be performed in chunks, reducing the memory overhead and enabling the handling of longer sequences without the prohibitive increase in memory access.

Think of tiling like trying to make a gigantic pizza, but instead of trying to shove the whole colossal pie into an oven, you smartly divide it into manageable slices. These slices can then be perfectly cooked, one by one, in the more modestly sized oven of your GPU's SRAM, and then, you can merge them back for the town hall meeting.

More Operations ≠ More Time

Another aspect of FlashAttention is its use of recomputation in the backward pass of the algorithm. Instead of storing the entire attention matrix, which can be exceedingly large, FlashAttention cleverly stores only what it needs for the rapid recomputation of attention.

Again, this jargon might sound confusing at the moment, but we'll unpack all of it by the end. I couldn't come up with an analogy for this one! But trust me, it's the simplest part of the whole idea, so we will revisit it when we’re ready.

Looking Ahead

As we dive into this series, we're going to unravel the secrets of the attention layer, take a closer look at how GPU memory works, and wrap it up with an exciting look at FlashAttention. I really hope this series will provide a lot of “aha!” moments, so stay tuned!
​

$5.00 Learning Rate Thank you for your support! It keeps the doors open and the wheels rolling. Photo by Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash​ Send a tip

​