Cost-Efficient LLM Training with Lifetime-Aware Tensor Offloading via GPUDirect Storage

We present the design and implementation of a new lifetime-aware tensor offloading framework for GPU memory expansion using low-cost PCIe-based solid-state drives (SSDs). Our framework, TERAIO, is developed explicitly for large language model (LLM) training with multiple GPUs and multiple SSDs. Its design is driven by our observation that the active tensors take only a small fraction (1.7% on average) of allocated GPU memory in each LLM training iteration, the inactive tensors are usually large and will not be used for a long period of time, creating ample opportunities for offloading/prefetching tensors to/from slow SSDs without stalling the GPU training process. TERAIO accurately estimates the lifetime (active period of time in GPU memory) of each tensor with the profiling of the first few iterations in the training process. With the tensor lifetime analysis, TERAIO will generate an optimized tensor offloading/prefetching plan and integrate it into the compiled LLM program via PyTorch. TERAIO has a runtime tensor migration engine to execute the offloading/prefetching plan via GPUDirect storage, which allows direct tensor migration between GPUs and SSDs for alleviating the CPU bottleneck and maximizing the SSD bandwidth utilization. In comparison with state-of-the-art studies such as ZeRO-Offload and ZeRO-Infinity, we show that TERAIO improves the training performance of various LLMs by 1.47x on average, and achieves 80.7% of the ideal performance assuming unlimited GPU memory.

Program of Equations Thoughts to Solve Algebra Word Problems

Solving algebraic word problems (AWPs) has recently emerged as an important natural language processing task. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful mathematical capabilities, and the Chain-of-Thought technique, which guides LLMs through step-by-step reasoning, has yielded impressive results. However, this reasoning ability is limited by the computational weaknesses of LLMs themselves, where calculation errors can accumulate, leading to incorrect final answers. To address this, we propose Program of Equations Thoughts (POET), which transforms the task of generating step-by-step reasoning answers into a two-stage task of predicting equations and generating code, offloading complex computations to a Python interpreter to avoid calculation errors in LLMs. Furthermore, we propose Zero-shot POET, which utilizes a manually designed template to enable LLMs to directly generate Python code for one-step solving. Our method achieves accuracies of 95.3% and 98.0% on the PEN and ALG514 datasets, respectively, setting a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). Zero-shot POET also achieves the SOTA result of 95.5% on the DRAW-1K dataset.

ZenFlow: Enabling Stall-Free Offloading Training via Asynchronous Updates

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often exceeds GPU memory limits, prompting systems to offload model states to CPU memory. However, existing offloaded training frameworks like ZeRO-Offload treat all parameters equally and update the full model on the CPU, causing severe GPU stalls, where fast, expensive GPUs sit idle waiting for slow CPU updates and limited-bandwidth PCIe transfers. We present ZenFlow, a new offloading framework that prioritizes important parameters and decouples updates between GPU and CPU. ZenFlow performs in-place updates of important gradients on GPU, while asynchronously offloading and accumulating less important ones on CPU, fully overlapping CPU work with GPU computation. To scale across GPUs, ZenFlow introduces a lightweight gradient selection method that exploits a novel spatial and temporal locality property of important gradients, avoiding costly global synchronization. ZenFlow achieves up to 5x end-to-end speedup, 2x lower PCIe traffic, and reduces GPU stalls by over 85 percent, all while preserving accuracy.

SpecOffload: Unlocking Latent GPU Capacity for LLM Inference on Resource-Constrained Devices

Efficient LLM inference on resource-constrained devices presents significant challenges in compute and memory utilization. Due to limited GPU memory, existing systems offload model weights to CPU memory, incurring substantial I/O overhead between the CPU and GPU. This leads to two major inefficiencies: (1) GPU cores are underutilized, often remaining idle while waiting for data to be loaded; and (2) GPU memory has low impact on performance, as reducing its capacity has minimal effect on overall throughput.In this paper, we propose SpecOffload, a high-throughput inference engine that embeds speculative decoding into offloading. Our key idea is to unlock latent GPU resources for storing and executing a draft model used for speculative decoding, thus accelerating inference at near-zero additional cost. To support this, we carefully orchestrate the interleaved execution of target and draft models in speculative decoding within the offloading pipeline, and propose a planner to manage tensor placement and select optimal parameters. Compared to the best baseline, SpecOffload improves GPU core utilization by 4.49x and boosts inference throughput by 2.54x. Our code is available at https://github.com/MobiSense/SpecOffload .

Adaptive Machine Learning for Resource-Constrained Environments

The Internet of Things is an example domain where data is perpetually generated in ever-increasing quantities, reflecting the proliferation of connected devices and the formation of continuous data streams over time. Consequently, the demand for ad-hoc, cost-effective machine learning solutions must adapt to this evolving data influx. This study tackles the task of offloading in small gateways, exacerbated by their dynamic availability over time. An approach leveraging CPU utilization metrics using online and continual machine learning techniques is proposed to predict gateway availability. These methods are compared to popular machine learning algorithms and a recent time-series foundation model, Lag-Llama, for fine-tuned and zero-shot setups. Their performance is benchmarked on a dataset of CPU utilization measurements over time from an IoT gateway and focuses on model metrics such as prediction errors, training and inference times, and memory consumption. Our primary objective is to study new efficient ways to predict CPU performance in IoT environments. Across various scenarios, our findings highlight that ensemble and online methods offer promising results for this task in terms of accuracy while maintaining a low resource footprint.

ProTrain: Efficient LLM Training via Memory-Aware Techniques

It is extremely memory-hungry to train Large Language Models (LLM). To solve this problem, existing work exploits the combination of CPU and GPU for the training process, such as ZeRO-Offload. Such a technique largely democratizes billion-scale model training, making it possible to train with few consumer graphics cards. However, based on our observation, existing frameworks often provide coarse-grained memory management and require experienced experts in configuration tuning, leading to suboptimal hardware utilization and performance. This paper proposes ProTrain, a novel training system that intelligently balances memory usage and performance by coordinating memory, computation, and IO. ProTrain achieves adaptive memory management through Chunk-Based Model State Management and Block-Wise Activation Management, guided by a Memory-Aware Runtime Profiler without user intervention. ProTrain does not change the training algorithm and thus does not compromise accuracy. Experiments show that ProTrain improves training throughput by 1.43$\times$ to 2.71$\times$ compared to the SOTA training systems.

Endor: Hardware-Friendly Sparse Format for Offloaded LLM Inference

The increasing size of large language models (LLMs) challenges their usage on resource-constrained platforms. For example, memory on modern GPUs is insufficient to hold LLMs that are hundreds of Gigabytes in size. Offloading is a popular method to escape this constraint by storing weights of an LLM model to host CPU memory and SSD, then loading each weight to GPU before every use. In our case study of offloaded inference, we found that due to the low bandwidth between storage devices and GPU, the latency of transferring large model weights from its offloaded location to GPU memory becomes the critical bottleneck with actual compute taking nearly 0% of runtime. To effectively reduce the weight transfer latency, we propose a novel sparse format that compresses the unstructured sparse pattern of pruned LLM weights to non-zero values with high compression ratio and low decompression overhead. Endor achieves this by expressing the positions of non-zero elements with a bitmap. Compared to offloaded inference using the popular Huggingface Accelerate, applying Endor accelerates OPT-66B by 1.70x and Llama2-70B by 1.78x. When direct weight transfer from SSD to GPU is leveraged, Endor achieves 2.25x speedup on OPT-66B and 2.37x speedup on Llama2-70B.

TriForce: Lossless Acceleration of Long Sequence Generation with Hierarchical Speculative Decoding

With large language models (LLMs) widely deployed in long content generation recently, there has emerged an increasing demand for efficient long-sequence inference support. However, key-value (KV) cache, which is stored to avoid re-computation, has emerged as a critical bottleneck by growing linearly in size with the sequence length. Due to the auto-regressive nature of LLMs, the entire KV cache will be loaded for every generated token, resulting in low utilization of computational cores and high latency. While various compression methods for KV cache have been proposed to alleviate this issue, they suffer from degradation in generation quality. We introduce TriForce, a hierarchical speculative decoding system that is scalable to long sequence generation. This approach leverages the original model weights and dynamic sparse KV cache via retrieval as a draft model, which serves as an intermediate layer in the hierarchy and is further speculated by a smaller model to reduce its drafting latency. TriForce not only facilitates impressive speedups for Llama2-7B-128K, achieving up to 2.31$\times$ on an A100 GPU but also showcases scalability in handling even longer contexts. For the offloading setting on two RTX 4090 GPUs, TriForce achieves 0.108s/token$\unicode{x2014}$only half as slow as the auto-regressive baseline on an A100, which attains 7.78$\times$ on our optimized offloading system. Additionally, TriForce performs 4.86$\times$ than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference on a single RTX 4090 GPU. TriForce's robustness is highlighted by its consistently outstanding performance across various temperatures. The code is available at https://github.com/Infini-AI-Lab/TriForce.

Sequoia: Scalable, Robust, and Hardware-aware Speculative Decoding

As the usage of large language models (LLMs) grows, performing efficient inference with these models becomes increasingly important. While speculative decoding has recently emerged as a promising direction for speeding up inference, existing methods are limited in their ability to scale to larger speculation budgets, and adapt to different hyperparameters and hardware. This paper introduces Sequoia, a scalable, robust, and hardware-aware algorithm for speculative decoding. To attain better scalability, Sequoia introduces a dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal tree structure for the speculated tokens. To achieve robust speculative performance, Sequoia uses a novel sampling and verification method that outperforms prior work across different decoding temperatures. Finally, Sequoia introduces a hardware-aware tree optimizer that maximizes speculative performance by automatically selecting the token tree size and depth for a given hardware platform. Evaluation shows that Sequoia improves the decoding speed of Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B, and Vicuna-33B on an A100 by up to $4.04\times$, $3.73\times$, and $2.27\times$. For offloading setting on L40, Sequoia achieves as low as 0.56 s/token for exact Llama2-70B inference latency, which is $9.96\times$ on our optimized offloading system (5.6 s/token), $9.7\times$ than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference, $19.5\times$ than Huggingface Accelerate.

UAV Communications in Integrated Terrestrial and Non-terrestrial Networks

With growing interest in integrating terrestrial networks (TNs) and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) to connect the unconnected, a key question is whether this new paradigm could also be opportunistically exploited to augment service in urban areas. We assess this possibility in the context of an integrated TN-NTN, comprising a ground cellular deployment paired with a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation, providing sub-6 GHz connectivity to an urban area populated by ground users (GUEs) and uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). Our study reveals that offloading UAV traffic to the NTN segment drastically reduces the downlink outage of UAVs from 70% to nearly zero, also boosting their uplink signal quality as long as the LEO satellite constellation is sufficiently dense to guarantee a minimum elevation angle. Offloading UAVs to the NTN also benefits coexisting GUEs, preventing uplink outages of around 12% that GUEs would otherwise incur. Despite the limited bandwidth available below 6 GHz, NTN-offloaded UAVs meet command and control rate requirements even across an area the size of Barcelona with as many as one active UAV per cell. Smaller UAV populations yield proportionally higher rates, potentially enabling aerial broadband applications.