Ring Attention
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UC Berkeley's Ring Attention scales transformer context to 100M+ tokens by distributing blockwise self-attention across devices in a ring topology.
Blockwise attention: Computes self-attention in blocks so that only small KV chunks need to fit on each device at any time.
Ring communication: Passes KV chunks between devices in a ring, overlapping communication with computation to hide networking latency.
Context scales with devices: Achievable context length grows linearly with the number of devices, with no attention approximations required.
100M+ tokens: Enables context lengths exceeding 100 million tokens in theory, far beyond what any single-device attention implementation can reach.
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