Tri-RMSNorm

This small package provides an custom GPU kernel for Root Mean Square layer normalization process with fused operations, leveraging the Triton compiler by OpenAI for high performance and parallel computations on GPUs. Implementation includes both forward and backward passes of RMS layer normalization, optimized for specifically empowering deep learning training and inferencing.

Features

Customized FW/BW RMS Normalization:

• Implements the forward and backward passes of RMS normalization with fused operations for better performance.

Triton and PyTorch Integration:

• Utilizes Triton for GPU-accelerated computations and parallel computation, seamlessly integrated with PyTorch tensors.

Customizable:

• Compile-time constants for block sizes, accommodating different GPU architectures and memory layouts.

Atomic Operations for Gradient Accumulation:

• Atomic operations to safely accumulate gradients across threads, preventing race conditions and ensuring correct gradient computation during the backward pass.

Lock-Free Mechanisms:

• Advanced sync to minimize locking and blocking, improving the performance and scalability of gradient computation.

Getting Started

Requirements

torch==2.1.0+cu121
torchaudio==2.1.0+cu121
torchvision==0.16.0+cu121
triton==2.1.0

You can install the package using pip3 install -e .:

git clone https://github.com/simudt/Tri-RMSNorm
cd Tri-RMSNorm
pip3 install -e .

Usage

The package provides two main functions:

• _rms_norm_fwd_fused for the forward pass of RMS normalization

• _rms_norm_bwd_dx_fused for the backward pass, computing gradients with respect to X, W, B

class RMSNormFunctionCustomKernel(torch.autograd.Function):
    @staticmethod
    def forward(ctx, x, weight, bias, eps):
        M, N = x.shape
        y = torch.empty_like(x)
        rstd = torch.empty(M, dtype=torch.float32, device=x.device)
        _rms_norm_fwd_fused[(M,)](x, y, weight, bias, rstd, x.stride(0), N, eps, BLOCK_SIZE=1024)
        ctx.save_for_backward(x, weight, bias, rstd)
        ctx.eps = eps
        ctx.N = N
        return y

    @staticmethod
    def backward(ctx, dy):
        x, weight, bias, rstd = ctx.saved_tensors
        eps = ctx.eps
        N = ctx.N
        M = x.shape[0]
        dx = torch.empty_like(x)
        _dw = torch.empty_like(weight)
        _db = torch.empty_like(bias)
        locks = torch.zeros(2 * 32, dtype=torch.int32, device=x.device)
        _rms_norm_bwd_dx_fused[(M,)](dx, dy, _dw, _db, x, weight, bias, rstd, locks, x.stride(0), N, eps, GROUP_SIZE_M=32, BLOCK_SIZE_N=1024)
        return dx, _dw, _db, None

def test_rms_norm_custom_kernel():
    eps = 1e-5
    input = torch.randn((1024, 1024), device='cuda', requires_grad=True)
    biases = torch.randn(1024, device='cuda', requires_grad=True)
    weights = torch.randn(1024, device='cuda', requires_grad=True)

    output = RMSNormFunctionCustomKernel.apply(input, weights, biases, eps)
    loss = output.mean()
    loss.backward()

    print("Grad X: ", input.grad)
    print("Grad W: ", weights.grad)
    print("Grad B: ", biases.grad)

test_rms_norm_custom_kernel()

Adjust grid, block, and other parameters as per your requirements and GPU specifications.

Benchmark

Tri-RMSNorm kernel demonstrates improved speedup in initial benchmarks when compared to the PyTorch-based custom RMSNorm implementation. Benchmarks will be included in the repository to ensure reproducibility. Compared to the LayerNorm custom kernel and the Tri-RMSNorm kernel, considering both the forward and backward passes, the mean speedup is approximately 28.57%. This respects the original results' range introduced in the RMSNorm paper, which states it "reduces the running time by 7% to 64% on different models." When compared to the standalone PyTorch RMSNorm implementation, and the Tri-RMSNorm kernel, considering both the forward and backward passes computations, yields a mean speedup of approximately 10.18%. For GB/s comparisons for both implementation, analyzed Benchmarking and Dissecting the Nvidia Hopper GPU Architecture.

Please note that:

• All benchmark tests will be released in the repository soon.
• All tests are conducted on a NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU, will be reproduced with A100 and 4090.
• Model training wasn't performed, with the customized kernel.
• A comparison with custom fused RMSNorm CUDA kernels implemented in xFormers has not been conducted, as of yet.

License

This package is licensed under the Apache License - see the LICENSE file for details.