FasterTransformer VS transformer-deploy

https://docs.nvidia.com/ai-enterprise/overview/0.1.0/platfor...

RIVA: NVIDIA® Riva, a premium edition of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, is a GPU-accelerated speech and translation AI SDK

FasterTransformer: https://github.com/NVIDIA/FasterTransformer an

There could be some spectrum of this expertise. For instance, https://github.com/NVIDIA/FasterTransformer, https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed

Have anyone tried to optimize the forward and backward using custom Cuda code or fused kernel to speed up the training time of current LLMs? I only have seen FasterTransformer ( NVIDIA/FasterTransformer) and other similar tools but they're only focusing on inference.

Replit built Ghostwriter on the open source scene based on Salesforce’s Codegen, using Nvidia’s FasterTransformer and Triton server for highly optimized decoders, and the knowledge distillation process of the CodeGen model from two billion parameters to a faster model of one billion parameters.

Nvidia FasterTransformer is a mix of Pytorch and CUDA/C++ dedicated code. The performance boost is huge on T5, they report a 10X speedup like TensorRT. However, the speedup is computed on a translation task where sequences are 25 tokens long on average. In our experience, improvement on very short sequences tend to decrease by large margins on longer ones. Still we plan to dig deeper into this project as it implements very interesting ideas.

On the other side of the spectrum, there is Nvidia demos (here or there) showing us how to build manually a full Transformer graph (operator by operator) in TensorRT to get best performance from their hardware. It’s out of reach for many NLP practitioners and it’s time consuming to debug/maintain/adapt to a slightly different architecture (I tried). Plus, there is a secret: the very optimized model only works for specific sequence lengths and batch sizes. Truth is that, so far (and it will improve soon), it’s mainly for MLPerf benchmark (the one used to compare DL hardware), marketing content, and very specialized engineers.

For 2), I am aware of a few options. Triton inference server is an obvious one as is the ‘transformer-deploy’ version from LDS. My only reservation here is that they require the model compilation or are architecture specific. I am aware of others like Bento, Ray serving and TorchServe. Ideally I would have something that allows any (PyTorch model) to be used without the extra compilation effort (or at least optionally) and has some convenience things like ease of use, easy to deploy, easy to host multiple models and can perform some dynamic batching. Anyway, I am really interested to hear people's experience here as I know there are now quite a few options! Any help is appreciated! Disclaimer - I have no affiliation or are connected in any way with the libraries or companies listed here. These are just the ones I know of. Thanks in advance.

We work for Lefebvre Sarrut, a leading European legal publisher. Several of our products include transformer models in latency sensitive scenarios (search, content recommendation). So far, ONNX Runtime and TensorRT served us well, and we learned interesting patterns along the way that we shared with the community through an open-source library called transformer-deploy. However, recent changes in our environment made our needs evolve:

here you will find a notebook for T5 on GPU with some tricks to make it fast: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/generative-model/t5.ipynb

Check the notebook https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/TorchDynamo/benchmark.ipynb for detailed results, but what we will keep in mind:

notebook: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/generative-model/t5.ipynb (Onnx Runtime only)

Regarding CPU inference, quantization is very easy, and supported by Transformer-deploy , however performance on transformer are very low outside corner cases (like no batch, very short sequence and distilled model), and last Intel generation CPU based instance like C6 or M6 on AWS are quite expensive compared to a cheap GPU like Nvidia T4, to say it otherwise, on transformer, until you are ok with slow inference and takes a small instance (for a PoC for instance), CPU inference is probably not a good idea.

The end to end tutorial: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/quantization_end_to_end.ipynb

Want to try it 👉 https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy