4 ms·
> The main challenge is latency since you have to do much more frequent communication. Earlier this year I experimented with building a cluster to do tensor pa
by dpe82 10mo ago
> The main challenge is latency since you have to do much more frequent communication.
Earlier this year I experimented with building a cluster to do tensor parallelism across large cache CPUs (AMD EPYC 7773X have 768mb of L3). My thought was to keep an entire model in SRAM and take advantage of the crazy memory bandwidth between CPU cores and their cache, and use Infiniband between nodes for the scatter/gather operations.
Turns out the sum of intra-core latency and PCIe latency absolutely dominate. The Infiniband fabric is damn fast once you get data to it, but getting it there quickly is a struggle. CXL would help but I didn't have the budget for newer hardware. Perhaps modern Apple hardware is better for this than x86 stuff.
- wmf 10mo agoThat's how Groq works. A cluster of LPUv2s would probably be faster and cheaper than an Infiniband cluster of Epycs.
- fooblaster 10mo agowhat is an lpuv2
- wmf 10mo agoThe chip that Groq makes.
- dpe82 10mo agoYeah I'm familiar; I was hoping I could do something related on previous generation commodity(ish) hardware. It didn't work but I learned a ton.