Baobao Algorithm Notes

Oct 30, 2024 · Artificial Intelligence

How Sequence Parallelism Slashes Activation Memory in Megatron Training

This article provides a detailed technical walkthrough of sequence parallelism (SP) for Megatron models, covering tensor parallelism basics, precise activation memory calculations for MLP and attention layers, the SP implementation that splits activations across GPUs, and selective activation recomputation strategies that further reduce memory while preserving training speed.