arXiv Machine Learning

Mixed-Precision Communication-Avoiding SGD for Generalized Linear Models on GPUs

arXiv:2606. 18463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is limited by communication rather than computation, since each iteration requires an AllReduce across processes.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Accelerating the Mitigation of LLM Inference Nondeterminism Across GPU Architectures

The paper addresses the problem of non‑deterministic outputs from large language models (LLMs) when run on different GPU architectures, caused by floating‑point non‑associativity and hardware‑dependent kernel choices. It proposes a set of fixed‑configuration fused‑upcast GEMM kernels that load 16‑bit weights, upcast to FP32, and perform IEEE‑754 compliant reductions in a problem‑shape‑dependent order, ensuring identical linear‑layer outputs across NVIDIA Ampere, Ada, and Hopper GPUs. The new approach achieves 1.17–3.1× faster end‑to‑end performance than existing solutions and halves weight‑memory traffic while maintaining cross‑architecture reproducibility.

By Liam Cooper, Shinnung Jeong, Hyeran Jeon, Jeffrey Young, Hyesoon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

SCAPE: Accurate and Efficient LLM Training with Extreme Sparse Communication

arXiv:2607. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale.

By Mingkai Zheng, Junlin Chen, Haotian Xie, Zhao Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

TACO: Ternary Absolute-max Column-wise One-sparse Optimizer for LLM Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces TACO, a new optimizer for fine‑tuning large language models that drastically reduces optimizer state memory while preserving first‑order gradients. TACO selects the sign of the largest magnitude entry in each column of weight matrices, achieving a 174× reduction in persistent optimizer memory compared to AdamW8bit and a 2.9× decrease in peak training memory on OPT‑13B. This allows full‑parameter fine‑tuning of 30–32B‑parameter models on a single 80 GB GPU across multiple model families and tasks, with comparable accuracy and runtime to existing methods.

By Jichao Jiang (University of Central Florida), Cristian McGee (University of Central Florida), El Houcine Bergou (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University), Hanqin Cai (University of Central Florida), Aritra Dutta (University of Central Florida)
arXiv AI
Sep 11

FP8 is All You Need (Part 1): Debunking Hardware FP64 as the HPC Holy Grail (Sep 3rd version)

The article argues that on AI‑optimised NVIDIA B300 GPUs and newer, the FP8 tensor‑core matrix operation—implemented via the CRT‑based Ozaki Scheme II—can become the primary substrate for matrix‑heavy FP64 kernels while maintaining FP64‑grade accuracy. It introduces the Tensor‑Memory Equilibrium (TME) model, a Roofline extension with four parameters, to show that FP8 can match native FP64 performance under certain intensity thresholds and tile‑fusion conditions. The study identifies two notable exceptions—large dense‑square DGEMM and 3‑D FFT—where additional hardware or software adjustments are required to reach the memory roof. whyItMatters":"The paper demonstrates that FP8, with appropriate reconstruction and deconstruction strategies, can replace native FP64 for high‑performance computing workloads on modern GPUs, potentially reducing hardware complexity and energy consumption while preserving accuracy."

By Satoshi Matsuoka